Please note: This was screened in Dec 2019
Arnaud Desplechin's (Ismael's Ghosts) latest is a murder mystery based on a real-life crime in Roubaix, a city in Northern France where he was born.
It centres on quiet but first police captain Daoud (Roschdy Zem), who is investigating the fatal strangulation of a poor, elderly woman in her apartment. Suspicion immediately falls on her two next door neighbours (Léa Seydoux and Sara Forestier), and it is their interrogations that take up the bulk of the film. Desplechin focuses on how a police investigation works, in all of its details, and this authenticity shines through. We are plunged into the lives of the marginalised, the destitute and those who have to fight to even be part of the working class in this community - a tangled web of sympathies in a sensitive, engrossing study of social reality.