Dossier 137

The title itself contains much of what the film wants to say. Before there is a victim, a name or a shattered life, there is a number: Case 137. One more file inside an institution required to investigate its own members and determine what happened during the Yellow Vest protests. That depersonalization is deliberate and meaningful, although it is also what kept me emotionally distant from the story for quite a long time.
Dominik Moll returns to the world of policing from a very different perspective from The Night of the 12th. Here we follow Stéphanie, superbly played by Léa Drucker, an IGPN investigator tasked with establishing how a young protester ended up seriously injured during a police operation. The investigation moves through videos, testimonies, schedules, positions, regulations and contradictions. It is a genuine procedural: little spectacle and a great deal of meticulous reconstruction.
That rigor deserves considerable credit. Moll and Gilles Marchand show how establishing responsibility can become desperately complicated when numerous officers, conflicting versions, incomplete images and an institution with inevitable mechanisms of internal protection are involved. Patrick Ghiringhelli photographs everything with a restraint perfectly suited to that approach: the film rarely tries to beautify what it shows or turn the investigation into a conventional thriller driven by major twists.
My problem is that this coldness worked better for me as an idea than as cinema. For a considerable part of the running time, I felt that I was following a file rather than accompanying people. I completely understood the intention, but struggled to become involved. Significantly, the film becomes much more interesting to me when the case stops being entirely abstract for Stéphanie and acquires a personal dimension. That is when what had previously been statements, footage and protocols finally begins to acquire blood.
Léa Drucker is essential to making that transition work. Her character belongs to the police, investigates police officers and gradually discovers how the pursuit of truth can conflict with institutional loyalty. Moll wisely avoids turning her into an unquestionable heroine or reducing the film to a simple struggle between good cops and bad cops. What emerges is more uncomfortable: a structure in which even people convinced that they are behaving correctly may contribute to making responsibility extraordinarily difficult to establish.
That is also where Case 137 is at its strongest. Rather than identifying a single "bad apple," it asks what happens when an institution must investigate itself, and how procedures designed to guarantee justice can also become obstacles to achieving it. No enormous conspiracy is necessary. Professional solidarity, mutually protective accounts, uncertainty and regulations can be enough to make demonstrable truth increasingly difficult to reach.
I therefore understand the strong critical response. It is serious, rigorous, superbly acted and avoids sensationalism in a subject that could easily have encouraged it. But I also understand those who find it excessively dry or heavy. Its method is so consistent that at times the film seems trapped inside the very bureaucracy it wants to examine.
Ultimately, I was more interested in what it says than moved by how it says it. Perhaps that is my main distance from the film. I understand why the case is called 137, and I understand the horror of a person being reduced to exactly that: another number to process, investigate and possibly archive. The idea is powerful. The execution is rigorous. But it took too long for me to stop seeing the file and start seeing the people inside it.