Review by Beatrice On 23-Sep-2024
In shaping our lives, are we the billiard cue, the player, or the ball? Are we the ones playing, or are we the ones being played with?
Prelude and Fugue No. 2, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1, Prelude in C Minor BWV 999 by J.S. Bach: the soundtrack of doubt and torment.
2017, Camargue, a wetland area south of Arles, France, the European habitat of the pink flamingo.
A call comes from the police station: a public defender is needed.
Nicolas Milik has been arrested, accused of killing his alcoholic wife.
Father of three daughters and two sons, he claims he is innocent.
Lawyer Jean Monier decides to take the case.
He begins his investigation among relatives, friends, neighbors: everyone except the woman's family sides with Nicolas’s innocence, including the very young children.
The only suspicion against the man is that he was influenced by his bartender friend Roger, whom he visited on the night of the murder, who might have convinced him to do it.
The lawyer is absolutely convinced of the man's innocence, though he has a demon to battle: 15 years earlier, he had managed to get an acquittal for a murderer, who, once released, continued to commit crimes.
Few external scenes, almost everything takes place in the courtroom.
The thread referred to in the original title is the one found under the nails of the murdered wife, from the fabric of the husband's jacket, but also the thread that should metaphorically lead to finding the way out of the labyrinthine investigation without further empirical evidence.
A true story told directly by a lawyer in a book under a pseudonym, never translated into Italian: Au guet-apens: Chroniques de la justice pénale ordinaire by Maître Mô.
The first 90 minutes seem to confirm Nicolas’s innocence, a shy, reserved man, at times tender and empathetic, which leads to the doubt that this is a judicial error, mainly based on his inability to decide freely how to act, how to defend himself, how to shield himself from the accusations, and the need to return to his children, now orphaned due to his detention.
The only hostility against him comes from the prosecutor and the victim's sister.
The doubt that remains even after the 20-year prison sentence is the character weakness of a man dictated by the need not to disappoint others’ expectations, for better or for worse.
The last 20 minutes of the film will be absolutely surprising: the measure of doubt becomes boundless, the thread knots in a cruel, insidious, perverse way, leading to a truth that only the concreteness of facts from a true story could guarantee because reality always surpasses fiction.
The ability to slowly reveal the facts, sparking doubts, stimulating reflections, highlighting personality traits that may have influenced a certain type of behavior is captivating, right up to the traumatic final acceleration, unexpected and shocking.
A film that subtly insinuates itself into the cinematic path in an apparently neutral way, takes a completely surprising content turn: the ethical theme, professional conflict, unpredictability, conviction, and, as a result, the choice to take a direction, doubt, and with it the specter of error, the truth that can never be fully considered, measured, evaluated, or reached, the risk but above all the mystery of the externally normal, familiar human being, and therefore always unknowable and unpredictable.
A magnificently disorienting film.
Life is an illogical individual unknown to which we wish to attribute a sensible ideology in order not to fall into the abyss of inequity.
23-Sep-2024 by Beatrice