Sometimes you watch a police procedural anticipating a meaty plot with twists and unexpected suspects coming to light. At other times, the film is intended to challenge prejudices we in the public may hold.
Stephane Demoustier wrote and directed this film with the second aim. For this reason, it’s not really a thriller, it’s more a realist study of what an impending court case does to a family when the accused is a teenager.
Add to the mix that the teenager is uncommunicative, even coming across as surly to outsiders, and you are faced with the dilemma of a family who neither know the truth nor feel as if they understand their child anymore.
Melissa Guers plays the taciturn Lise Bataille, accused of killing her best friend in a frenzied attack. Her surname may be a tip of the hat to George Bataille, the late French philosopher who explored teenage transgression and eroticism in his pornographic The Story of the Eye, written in 1928 under the pseudonym Lord Auch and translated into English in 1987.
The nod to Bataille becomes relevant as details emerge of Lise’s sexuality and relationships. The theme is obviously that wanton sex between consenting teens is not to be judged and is, per se, certainly no motive for violent crime.
Before the court case we see the long drawn-out wait while legal proceedings are undertaken, with the parents attempting to retain a modicum of normality. Their faux jollity with their younger son rings hollow as they seek to communicate with their daughter. We see the differing styles of coping in this situation - the father who is there for every interview and court case, the mother who can only cope through denial, and busies herself in a flurry of activity which means she can’t physically be there with her daughter.
The title probably refers to Lise’s time under house arrest where she has a GPS ankle monitor to restrict her movements. The ennuie of this time deprived of social contact is well observed, as is the comfort of the presence of a sibling, even if he’s too young to confide in.
The theme is a worthwhile one, but the script just doesn’t give enough. Lise remains silent and inscrutable until she finally spills about the relationship she had with the victim and with others in their circle of friends. And yet even as she explains and we watch, many of us finding her behaviour emotionally unconnected and flat, we seek possible motives or other suspects for the murder and are given scant material to chew on.
When you introduce a topic as heinous as a murder through multiple stabbing, you are obliged to provide possible scenarios, postulated answers to the mystery. The more of these they are, the more difficult it becomes to come to a conclusion. But here we are given nothing. There is some twittering about a knife which disappears and then reappears, but it doesn’t offer us any possible trajectory for the atrocious event.
In the end, this viewer was left as if she had been lectured on being broad-minded about teenagers freely exploring their sexuality with each other, with or without emotional ties, but with the central premise utterly unresolved. Of course many thrillers end with uncertainty and you are left guessing as to the guilt or innocence of the main protagonist, but for this to work, we need alternative scenarios complete with motive and opportunity.
I felt as if I had come for a fresh baguette and been offered crumbs from the table.