Plot & Summary
This French gem features the restrained and powerful performance that won Nathalie Baye the Cesar award for best actress of 2006. "Le Petit Lieutenant" is an extremely tough drama about police life. Two Russian immigrants are going around robbing and stabbing people and throwing them into the river, and we see the process by which the homicide team gathers information. Yet this investigation, while at the center of the action, is not central to the movie's purpose, which is to explore the lives of a young rookie lieutenant from Le Havre (Jalil Lespert) and his boss, Caroline, the commandant, played by Baye.
More than on "Prime Suspect," more than any film in recent memory, "Le Petit Lieutenant" conveys the relentless toll of big-city police work. We get this in a number of ways, and yet as it wears on, the film's locus of meaning, more and more, becomes Baye's face. It's all there in her pained, stoic expression -- the physical and emotional exhaustion, the poison that works its way inside, the seeming meaninglessness of trying to hold back the tide of crime, the impossibility of suppressing human nature at its ugliest, and the crisis of the spirit that would naturally follow. Director Xavier Beauvois sums it all up in a beautiful final shot, the moment that won Baye the Cesar.
Rating
6.9/10; 1,097 votesDownload movie with subtitles
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