ReganRebecca
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.
Laurinette
This vivid movie is deeply touching. We taste all the range of emotions : disgust, anguish, laughter ("Eh... I lost my phone !").All the actors are perfect, Joey Starr and Marina Foïs ahead. The children are outstanding as well.We're seeing the day-to-day life of the entire squad, their personality and bond are all different and very interesting. In my opinion there aren't supporting roles. Each one contribute to the richness of the movie. All the case depicted, theses lives, are overwhelming. From the little girl whose father "loves her too much" to the molested delivering girl, not to mention heart-breaking Ousmane. And yet it's the everyday life of a juvenile division. I couldn't bear it. My favorite movie of 2011 for the feelings it brought me.
need_move
This could have a been a very good drama based on a very serious subject. There are some interesting and powerful moments but overall the bad acting and poor script made me wonder what the hell I was watching and how the hell could I have been made to believe this film was worth it. When I looked it up post-hoc and found who the director was it all started to make sense. Maïwen, a mildly annoying character running around with her 10-euro camera taking pictures of everything and pretending to be a professional photographer is also the director of this film! Maïwenn - here's a piece of advice for you: a jack-of-all trades is a master of none. You should have stuck to your wonderful acting career and leave this theme alone! This film should be shown in art schools as an example of how NOT to make films.
writers_reign
At any given time there are upwards of a dozen French actresses - spanning several decades - working in cinema, any one of whose name on a marquee is sufficient to draw me to the box-office irrespective of whether the given actress is working with unknowns or with a cast of her peers of both sexes. In the second decade of the 21st century the pickings are rich; Danielle Darrieux, who made her name in the thirties is still with us and worked as recently as 2010, Micheline Presle, who rose to prominence in the forties is always prepared to don the old slap any time her daughter, Toni Marshall directs a new film, Jeanne Moreau, first seen in the early fifties remains fully active and from the sixties we have Catherine Deneuve, arguably the doyenne of present day French cinema. After Deneuve the deluge, Isabelle Huppert, Nathalie Baye, Fanny Ardant, Isabel Carre, Carole Bouquet, Sandrine Bonnaire, Mathilde Seigneur, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Cecile de France, Nicole Garcia, Agnes Jouai, Valerie Lemercier, the list goes on. It was an actress who drew me to Polisse; when I turned up at the cinema all I knew about Polisse was that it featured Karin Viard, what I didn't know was that it also featured Marina Fois and Sandrine Kimberlain and above all this I didn't know what it took me five minutes, tops, to realize, that it was a GREAT film with an equally great ensemble cast that includes writer-director Maiwenn. It has the authenticity of a documentary and one reviewer here has compared it to Le Petit Lieutenant, a reasonable comparison although I tend to think of it in the same breath as L.627. No matter, Polisse stands alone as a record of the Child Protection Unit in Paris and Maiwenn gives us the whole thing from soup to nuts, from the child victims to the adult abusers to the tight-knit unit seeing human sorrow and human evil day after day, week after week and often unable to remain aloof. It's actually quite a long film but it seems like only minutes such is the power of the ensemble. Ten stars going away.
AD
