In a sense the film's jarring form is justified by its diegetic motifs. After all, the world of child molesters is very much a harsh one, and the film seeks to capture both the numbing violence and the anger that these officers experience in their job. The form blocks sentimentality and produces in the spectator the same nausea and disgust one would confront "in the field"--and successful it was at convincing at least five people to walk out of the theater at the late-night screening where I saw the film. There is, however, a deeper dimension to both the film's form and its content (and their zone of indiscernability) that I wish to register here, one that articulates an interesting if disturbing link between the portable cinematic apparatus and apparatuses of State power. My comments, of course, are meant to be broadly applicable.
The central thematic crisis of the film seems to be that of "the Child," its status and futurity in the contemporary world. What lines are there between children and adults? How does the law regulate this relationship? Polisse depicts the desperate attempts of law enforcement agencies to maintain an adequate distinction between the adult and the child by rigorously enforcing standards of child abuse ("any sexual interaction between a parent and a child is rape" as one of the officer says). The crisis of the child is exacerbated by the presence of immigrants both old and new in a Paris of multicultural anxieties. The Child Protection Unit, after receiving a lead on a certain uncle in a Romanian trailer park who enlists children as pickpockets and prostitutes, enacts a raid on the entire encampment, arresting all the adults and taking the children to a "shelter." In a hauntingly ambivalent sequence, the children are photographed with nameplates and made to board a bus--the topoi here are unmistakable. Yet, Maïwenn appears to be unwilling to entertain the significance of the graphic match between child protection and the concentration camp, so the sequence ends with the bus driver turning on music and the children miraculously forget recent history as they begin to dance. This is too not an unfamiliar image--discos are, after all, made for forgetting. But it becomes less innocent when disco music is used to justify the actions of the police.
It is this forgetting that ensures that there will be no posterity. First of all, there is the breakdown of the bourgeois family, that institutionalized imposter in the history of cultures. There are no nuclear families in the film, only pedophiles and romances "on the force." In perhaps the most allegorical sequence in the film (if one chooses to allegorize), a fourteen year old rape victim has a stillborn baby. She asks "what will happen to him?" "Will he be buried with all the other babies?" "Yes." "Individually or all together?" "All Together." The police place the corpse inside a cooler and take it to the lab for DNA tests. Futurity enters into the cold laboratories and hallways of the State, which alone ensures the continuation of the Nation. This is the state of exception in which the film places us. The center of the film's anxiety is that children do not understand themselves as children: one makes naked videos of herself on the internet, another matter-of-factly states that she gave a blowjob to have a thief return her smartphone. Yet, for all this crisis in the definition of the Child, agencies of the State are given even wider purview to define and enforce what it sees as proper relationships. One cop, Iris, sees a woman shaking her baby from the coffeeshop. She stops the woman and takes her in for questioning, since this seemed abnormal behavior. During the interview, the woman admits that she jerks off one of her boys so to quiet him down. Iris tells her, here, that any sexual interaction between parent and child is rape. In another instance, Nora, who herself appears Algerian, interrogates a Muslim man; fed up with his condescension towards her on account of her gender, she threatens to charge him for accessory to rape after his daughter's arranged marriage is consummated. It is undeniable that in each instance there is a "justice" at stake--one that in fact may very much be worth defending--but this justice, in order to make itself known, in order to mark the territory of its guilt, is made to enter increasingly dark corridors of exceptionality. The Child is the state of exception, the place in which the future cannot simply be allowed to "take place."
Let us now go to the place of the authorial signature, which in this film very much does function as a kind of navel or severed umbilical cord. In the middle of a citywide search for a mother who kidnapped her baby from day care, Joey Starr's character (Fred) confronts the photographer-director, chiding her for "snapping away" with her camera, and challenging her as to what kind of truth the camera could capture. He tells her that the camera can never "do justice" to "what we do." There is no answer. In a sense, "what we do" exists beyond cinema; it is exceptional, and contra Bazin, the truth of "what we do" does not "lay itself bare like a suspect confessing under the relentless examination of the commissioner of police." Perhaps films about the police can never make the police confess...another instantiation of the age old dilemma: "who polices the police?" The exceptionality of "what we do" with respect to the mundane powers of cinema will be repeated again and again in the film through its repertoire of citations. During the manhunt for the woman-kidnapper, someone suggests that the woman has dyed her hair so that nobody recognizes her, and the rejoinder: "what do you think this is? a Western?" No it is not a Western. "What we do" is real, not a movie. The film's citation of Le Mepris in a game of charades seems to echo this point--this is a film about the excess of the real to the dream factory, with the one catch that the real is policework. The breakdown of the holy family means that the great burden of social reproduction is shifted onto our men in blue, who must wrest all children away from the icky interiorities of the oedipal triangle and put them in shelters... at least in France they have the funding for shelters.
A final two sequences merit discussion. As the police interview a father who "loves [his daughter] too much," but has "connections" such that he can afford to act pompous, Fred becomes enraged and punches the man in the face. The guy says "you'll pay for this" and Fred replies "no one saw anything...this camera didn't see anything." The man replies, "yes I know, the camera sees what you want it to see." Of course cameras at police stations see what the police want them to see, but this is not quite the point. Fred is enraged because the man dares to openly say that he likes young girls in a blasé mode and "on camera" as if here were not aware of the gravity of the charge. It is not that he refuses to confess to the commissioner of police; it is rather than the man openly confesses without the weight of guilt, before the camera. Which reveals the fact that guilt, like "what we do," cannot be recorded by cameras. On the contrary, guilt must be inscribed, as Kafka said, on the body of the guilty until the body is made into a bloody pulp, until it has been entirely metamorphosed into the inscription of its crime. The pedophile's lack of internalized guilt, itself a effect of his corruption, makes it that Fred must produce this guilt through violence, and thus Fred (and perhaps us too) wants to beat the man to a bloody pulp, then draw and quarter him before the crowd. To this process, to guilt such as it is consecrated in the most ancient sense, modern media are fundamentally indifferent. Hence, the film never gives us a chance to register guilt, to make images confess. The film's haptic cuts crowd the sensorium; it never gives us time to think--to think about what? guilt. It is in this sense that the raid on the gypsy encampment can only produce a graphic match with the camps before the disco music begins.
And the film ends in a graphic match, uncharacteristically in slow motion and to non-diegetic music, between two falling bodies. On one hand, there is a boy (who had previously been a victim of molestation). doing a mid-air flip at a gymnastics competition. On the other hand, Iris has decided to jump out a window pursuant to a restructuring of the police department. She falls, he flips. She falls, he flips. An adult who dies, a child who completes his flip, two forms sent flying through mid air, one towards death the other towards the future. But there is nothing. Only the most abstract of forms.
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