Dossier 137

 

The truth is rarely pure and never simple. 
— Oscar Wilde 

There are professions that carry within their very mandate a paradox of an existential nature: those in which the one who holds the function of control must, in turn, be controlled. Dominik Moll — the Franco-German director already capable of wounding us with The Night of the 12th — excavates this paradox with Case 137 (Dossier 137), a work of rare moral integrity that transforms a French news story into a meditation on the deeper meaning of justice, on the solitude of those who pursue it, and on the price that ethics demands from those who choose not to waver. 

The protagonist, Stéphanie Bertrand — portrayed by a measured and powerful Léa Drucker, César Award winner for her performance — embodies that Kierkegaardian figure of the individual who chooses herself at the moment when the choice is most burdensome: not against an external enemy, but against, albeit in favour of, the system she belongs to; against, albeit in favour of, her own tribe; against, albeit in favour of, that esprit de corps which, within uniformed institutions, so often reaches the density of a second nature. To be the "police of the police" is not a profession: it is an ontological condition of permanent otherness. One is inside and outside, simultaneously. One belongs to the institution and is perceived as a traitor to it. 

Moll never yields to the temptation of the pamphlet, nor to the simplification of the civic melodrama. His direction — sober, almost documentary in its adherence to procedural reality — builds a tension rooted not in action, but in friction: the friction between what one knows, what one can prove, and what institutions are willing to acknowledge. The film feeds on the philosophy of law in its most uncomfortable dimension: professional deontology as a categorical imperative, in the most rigorous Kantian sense. Stéphanie does not investigate because it serves her interests, nor because she will be rewarded for doing so — quite the contrary — but because not doing so would mean betraying the one thing that gives meaning to her function: the law equal for all, even for those who enforce it. 

The omertà Moll depicts is not the cinematic kind associated with organised crime. It is subtler, more pervasive, and for that reason more unsettling: it is the silence of the one who averts their gaze during a deposition, the suddenly fragile memory of a witness in uniform, the solidarity of those who cover up not out of malice but out of fear, exhaustion, a misplaced loyalty that mistakes the institution for a family. It is the omertà of those who know that reporting a colleague means breaking an unwritten but deeply felt social pact: one of us. 

The case at the heart of the film — the permanent injury of a young protester struck in the head during the Gilets Jaunes riots of December 2018 — becomes in the film a limit situation in the Jaspersian sense: an extreme circumstance that offers no escape, that compels every protagonist to reveal their true ethical nature. The violence of the flash-ball is not merely physical: it is the violence of power that exceeds its own limits, that forgets it is a means and perceives itself as an end. It is the abuse born not always of hatred, but of the certainty of impunity — which is, in turn, the offspring of a system of oversight that does not function, or does not wish to. 

The film interrogates with clarity the very structure of institutions: can they truly judge themselves from within? Can the IGPN be genuinely independent from the body it is meant to oversee? Moll offers no reassuring answers. On the contrary, he shows how the very institutions meant to guarantee transparency so often become procedural obstacles, bureaucratic walls, filters that slow things down, defusing the truth before it can surface. It is not necessarily corruption: it is something more insidious, which we might call — the banality of the institution: the tendency of systems to preserve themselves before pursuing the very purpose for which they were created. 

Stéphanie is not a heroine in the romantic sense. She is a woman who does her work with a tenacity that carries the flavour of daily ethical choice, of the quiet courage that never makes the headlines but underpins the foundations of any society that still wishes to call itself a state of law. Her solitude — professional, relational, existential — is the solitude of one who chooses truth as a compass in a world where truth is so often inconvenient, divisive, dangerous. 

Case 137 is a film that denounces through thinking. It questions what it truly means to serve the law, and what happens when those who are supposed to embody it are the first to violate it. It is a film about the radical difficulty of achieving justice within a system that, in order to survive, tends to protect itself. 

The hardest thing is to act according to what you believe, especially when it costs you something. — Simone Weil