Polisse

The average time that someone can work in child protection is two years. Some last longer, or there would not be supervisors, but it is a rough business, as this film depicts.

What should grab you is that they move from case to case without any continuity. This is the real world of child protection. You deal with a druggie mother today, a pederast grandfather tomorrow, and neglected or abused children the next day.

Some may find the language off-putting, but that is the way it is. You are under such stress during work, that you have to relieve it somehow after you get off. It may be crude, but it is effective.

I can also relate to those who lose it occasionally. You can put your heart and soul into this job, and get frustrated easily by parents and the bureaucracy.

The film may have been actors, but it has a documentary feel as they portray the action as it really happens.

Polisse is a documentary style feature film, which follows French police working with child molestation and abuse. We're follow them in a film without a plot, only everyday life and troubles, and through dinners and bar escapades. The cases and the language is really rough stuff, and this is obviously not for everyone. If you're easily offended, keep away.

We're given no explanation, just follow what happens as a fly on the wall. So is the director here, Maiwenn, which uses a small tourist camera, taking pictures all the time. Strange, and looking quite unprofessional, but then she is originally an actor. We're looking at actors, but this is all based upon real life, we're told, at least.

We see some horrific cases of them unveiling child abuse of different kinds, and when they talk in their spare time, the language is very graphic. Maybe this is a work hazard, still I find it strange that these grown ups talk low life language, using all kinds of sexual words when they seem to have a normal conversation. It might be right, but maybe this feels too much for an ordinary viewer. At least I thought so, and I'm not easily offended.

Two more things irritate. First of all Maiwenn, photographing everywhere with her old camera. She looks lame doing this, and ruins the impression of this as a serious movie. Sue's like a misfit, or bimbo in this film. She's acting, and I don't understand her mission in this. But being writer and director, she obviously needed a role as actor as well. With better professional help, the film would have been way better. Still there's lots of stuff which will hit you hard here.

The police acting like this in their spare time makes us also questioning their motives as well as their credibility and them being real professionals, though we really down to earth understand they are well qualified personnel. But from time to other you really wonder...

Interesting, and nice try, but still the film has some troubles impossible to disregard.

The second main problem is we never follow out the interesting things which we see. It's all small fragments. We don't get to know people. Instead we get longer pieces of non-important dancing at night clubs and ridiculous discussions. Still this is interesting, and worth to watch. Just expect to be annoyed, insulted, chocked, bored and disgusted every other minute.

Polisse was my favourite film at the recent Sydney Film Festival. A french film from writer, director, star Maiween, it tells the story of the Child Protection Unit in Paris. It was absolutely riveting from start to finish.

An ensemble piece that moves at a cracking pace, it could be forgiven for not establishing character, but it actually manages to do that and do it very well. We are introduced to this group of close knit colleagues as they go about their day trying to balance the horrors they have to deal with (rapists, kidnappers, abusers, paedophiles) with their personal lives.

Maiween spent quite some time with a real CPU and told us in the Q&A that all the cases she featured are just like ones she witnessed and with that experience she brought an almost documentary feel at the same time as adding creative drama and plot to moments of the story as they rush through case after case. The performances are all excellent and the editing is sublime (it won a French Oscar for this).

It's shocking, emotional, intense and surprisingly very funny.

Highly recommended if you like hard-hitting films that deal with serious subjects in a very human and darkly humorous way.

Polisse is a cop movie, but it's that rare cop movie that doesn't seek to glamourize the cops or make them out into heroes. For starters, instead of focusing on the more popular homicide unit, it's about a child protection unit (CPU) in the neighbourhood of Belleville in Paris. The CPU deals with some of the ugliest cases, mostly involving the sexual abuse of children.

Writer/director Maïwenn (who herself has a small role as a bourgeois photojournalist who embeds herself with the police) handles the difficult material well, never shying away from showing the police as the messy imperfect people they are. These are people who care deeply about what they do but also people who screw up, who fight amongst each other, who cheat on their spouses and don't have enough time for their friends and their family. Despite the fact that the movie is about two hours long, the huge ensemble means that there's a lot of ground to cover, but to Maïwenn and the actors credit, they characters all feel fleshed out and real.

The script is very textured and dense, and I'm not sure the subtitles do justice to the sheer volume of words and the difference in class that the dialects play with, but it's a wonderful great film, very epic in scope. Don't go into it expecting a linear simplistic story. Plot lines are introduced, but seldom wrapped up, but this works to the film's advantage, showing that in many cases this is as far as it can go for the police involved.

What an excellent film!

Full of good dialogue that feels real and down to earth it was not surprising to hear Maiwenn say (at the Sydney Film Festival Q&A) she had spent time with the real CPU. The reality of the emotions and the truthfulness of the situations this team faced was evident and really made the difference to this film.

What stops the review getting full marks is the films tendency to let some of the less interesting scenes play for too long. Oddly it's also the love story she included to make the film seem less bleak and Maiwenn's own character that become unnecessary and make the movie overburdened and run a little too long.

The cast is absolutely fantastic and engaging. Their relationships heartfelt and natural; you would think they had been playing this together for years.

This is a movie of the tougher, grimy side of a city. It presents the human behaviours we shudder to believe exist. And yet, handled so superbly, you will not feel wrung out or overwhelmed. It's a terrific movie that will have you talking for a long time.