Benoit Jacquot Belle Il caso Belle Steiner Thriller • 2024 • 1h 40m

The story of Belle Steiner unfolds in the solitude of a room, in the fragility of a body abandoned, in the voracity of a collective gaze that identifies the culprit even before being certain of it. A guest of Pierre and Cléa, the young woman is found strangled, naked, her body stripped not only of clothes but of any defense against the brutality of public judgment. The last to see her alive was Pierre, a mathematics teacher with an impassive face, a silent, inscrutable man, more guilty for his lack of reaction than for any possible action.

Cléa, wife and observer, overwhelmed by the situation and by the desperate pain of the girl's mother, believes in her husband's innocence. But can innocence exist in a world that feeds on suspicions and hasty condemnations? The small provincial microcosm, threatened by the presence of a possible monster, isolates him with the same naturalness with which an animal community frees itself from the sick element. Justice is no longer the prerogative of the courtroom: the smartphone has already rendered the verdict, social media acts as executioner and jury, transforming the private drama into a public pantomime. The verdict nests in the photographs, the comments, the mentions: the virtual court has already deliberated.

It is not only Pierre who suffers the weight of judgment: even Belle, though a victim, is not spared the violence of a society that dissects the past to find shadows that justify the unjustifiable. Her videos, her images, her exposed desires become evidence against her, as if her death were a logical consequence of her existence.

Pierre, for his part, does not defend himself. His resistance is nonexistent, his passivity absolute, as if his figure were nothing more than a reflection of others' narratives. His only guilt? To look. To watch the neighbor undress from the window, to look at feminine details with an almost abstract fascination, to observe the world with an interest that never translates into action.

Can one be guilty of a gaze? Can one be condemned for their opacity, for the lack of defense, for the simple refusal to adhere to the codes of their time? The doubt remains.

The investigation drags on, the judge interrogates him, the community isolates him, the students mock him on Snapchat with epithets that transform a man into a symbol of evil: the strangler. The word of the victim, reconstructed posthumously through the filter of the investigators, the village gossip, the media narrative, traps him without the need for irrefutable evidence. Even the numbers that Pierre teaches, so rigorous in their laws, cannot save him: probability dissolves in the arbitrariness of collective perception.

Yet, not everything is fixed and condemned. Pierre's fate crosses that of Aurélie, the transcriber of his depositions, another silent observer. With her, in a nightclub illuminated by neon lights, Pierre allows himself to be swept up in the flow of flesh, responding to the accusation of desire with the only act that can redeem him: desire itself.

But the truth? The truth remains an illusion. Pierre does not defend himself, does not absolve himself, does not accuse himself. He is a shadow in a game of distorting mirrors. His fate is already sealed, not by evidence, but by the necessity the world has to define a culprit.

Despite the extraordinary performance of the actors and the bleakness of Georges Simenon's novel, the film proves rather mediocre, with a screenplay that fails to do justice to the original material and a direction that fails to build the necessary tension, weakening the emotional and narrative impact.

Yet, in this long journey through suspicion, in the probing questions of the judge, in the inquisitive glances of the community, something emerges: the idea that guilt is not just an act, but a possibility. A thin line separates innocence from murder, and not always can one who has never killed claim with certainty that they have never been, even for an instant, a potential murderer. But the real crux of the story lies elsewhere. Its apparent estrangement from the facts hides a more disturbing truth: Pierre discovers himself as a stranger to himself. Like many people, he does not know how far he might go, does not know the nature of his own limits until he finds himself in an extreme condition.

The line between innocence and guilt is never clear-cut; it is a thread stretched over the abyss. The film suggests that the monster is not the other, but the possibility that inhabits us, that reveals itself when circumstances call it forth. Thus, Pierre, immersed in a game of shadows and suspicions, is not only a victim of an implacable social mechanism but also a witness to his own dark potential, that shadow every human carries within and that, under certain conditions, can emerge in all its ambiguous, terrible power.