A confidently made procedural from the Competition program for this year’s Palme d’Or should engage with audiences outside of Cannes more than two films that misstep enough that they’re likely to struggle when they leave the sea air on the Croisette.
Said procedural is Dominick Moll’s “Dossier 137,” a study of police violence and corruption that writes itself into a corner and then, brilliantly, forces us to sit there. While watching this ticking clock of a film, I kept wondering how Moll was going to reach a satisfying endpoint in a story with no winners, worried he would succumb to the common problem of filmmakers who try to craft unbroken stories about a broken system. The entire film works but his masterstroke, without spoiling, is where Moll lands: On a shot of such depressing concession regarding the impossibility of resolving the conflicts that define this film that it’s going to haunt me for some time.
Léa Drucker (“Last Summer”) is typically excellent as Stéphanie, an investigator with IGPN, the French version of internal affairs. Stéphanie is a familiar film character in this story based on actual events, incorporating footage from and inspired by the “Yellow Vest Protests” of 2018. In December of that year, the streets of Paris grew violent around protests of a fuel tax hike from French President Emmanuel Macron. Stéphanie is approached in 2019 by a mother whose son was horribly injured by a riot gun. His cranium was caved in and he nearly died. There has been no justice for him. Can Stéphanie be the good apple and find the people responsible?
Moll keeps us by Stéphanie’s side the entire film, leading to an effectively locked POV. We don’t know anything about the case until Stéphanie learns it, whether through talking to witnesses, getting access to CCTV footage, or interrogating potential assailants. We meet her ex-husband, who is still a cop, and her son, who asks her why no one likes the police. At times, “Dossier 137” can feel too much like a defense of the force, an answer to the question posed by Stéphanie’s son in the form of a remaining hero in an official uniform, but Moll allows cynicism to creep into the procedural, exploding in a fantastic scene near the end in which Stéphanie and her superior discuss potential bias in the case. Isn’t the very existence of the IGPN biased to its core? Her son’s father is still a cop. Her friends are cops. How could that not produce bias? The idea that cops investigating cops are inherently going to try to defend them instead of finding actual justice is at the rotten core of the entire system.
The relative predictability of “Dossier 137” gets a jolt of adrenalin through the addition of Guslagie Malanda, so excellent in “Saint Omer.” Here, she plays a maid who may have witnessed the crime, aware that her place in French society makes any sort of search for justice on her part far more dangerous than it does for Stéphanie. How quickly Stéphanie goes from by-the-numbers investigating to literally stalking Malanda’s character to get answers feels a bit rushed, but Drucker conveys the simmering anger that fuels her inquiries. We’re willing to go down this rabbit hole with her, even as we sense there can’t be possibly be light on the other side.
Moll’s film reaches its greatest impact after the mysteries of that night are cleared up. Actual footage of the incident can’t even provide the closure or justice that people need because cops have been trained their way around this kind of thing. One person’s kick is another’s nudge with his foot. It’s meant to infuriate us as much as it does Stéphanie. At least we don’t have to take it home with us.
The masterful Kazuo Ishiguro introduced the adaptation of his “A Pale View of Hills” on the first full day of Cannes 2025 by noting that he wrote it when he was only 25 and considered it a bad book in a legacy that includes very few of those. He pointed out that bad books are often made into great films, which is true, but not in this case. Kei Ishikawa not only can’t get around the issues of the source material, he amplifies them through stagey direction, flat performances, and shallow themes. A few captivating ideas peek through but they’re buried by insincere melodrama in a film that aims for profundity but only finds ambiguity.
“A Pale View of Hills” takes place in 1952 in Japan and three decades later in London. Niki (Camilla Aiko) has returned home, not too long after the death of her sister Keiko, to interview her mother Etsuko (Yoh Yoshida in 1982 and Suzu Hirose of “Asura” in 1952) about her life in Nagasaki not long after the bombing. The parallel arcs are defined by the tragedies that hang in the air—the worldwide one of the A-bomb and the personal one of a suicide, which can feel just as nuclear.
When Ishikawa flashes back to Nagasaki, he gives the film a sort of dreamlike quality, as if we’re watching a movie within a movie. The period details are heightened, the lighting turned up several degrees, and even the blocking feels exaggerated. It gives us the sense that what we’re watching as Etsuko befriends the ostracized single mother next door isn’t exactly what it seems, but that also makes these unreliable flashbacks hollow. When “A Pale View of Hills” eventually gets to its identity-shifting twists, it feels cheap, an unearned way to wring emotions from a film that hasn’t gotten there on its own.
Unreliable memories of a time as fraught as Japan in the early ‘50s might make for engaging fiction on the page, but it takes a much firmer hand in film form than Ishikawa has here. It doesn’t help that the 1982 performances simply aren’t very good. Only Kore-eda vet Hirose has any emotional pull, but the film keeps pushing us away from seeing her as a fully realized character. The misdirection and melodrama morph into something that’s truly difficult to see.
Integrity battles authority in Stéphane Demoustier’s well-made but remarkably flat “The Great Arch,” a drama that likely works much better to the French audience engaged by its period detail and ode to admittedly brilliant architecture. Endless battles over how to treat marble and the size of pillars drain the intended thematic thrust in this narratively dull work, a movie that makes its point early and then often. Claes Bang is typically strong as a man so committed to his vision that even the parts of it that people couldn’t see shan’t be altered but his character work is in the pursuit of something that can’t justify why one should watch it instead of just a documentary on the same subject.
Bang plays Johan Otto von Spreckelsen, a Danish designer who unexpectedly won a contest to build a massive structure known to some as The Cube in Paris, and then watched it destroy him. So committed to his vision, he fought with anyone who even suggested changing it, including his project manager Paul Andreu (Swann Arlaud of “Anatomy of a Fall,” effectively perturbed through most of the film). Surprisingly, Von Spreckelsen’s greatest ally would be Mitterand, but his political undoing during the project would also become our hero’s.
In an odd move, Demoustier gives Von Spreckelsen a fictional wife (revealing at the beginning that she didn’t exist) only to do almost nothing with her narratively other than to give our hero a sounding board for venting. And vent he does. Demoustier intends to valorize Von Spreckelsen’s commitment to his artistry at a time when such a thing was becoming increasingly rare, and she accomplishes that long before the film runs out of new things to say. A dramatic film about architecture is an inherently risky proposition and “The Great Arch” gets lost in the details that Von Spreckelsen considered so important.
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