La Moula

Jérôme is a crime reporter whose career seems to have reached a dead end. Offering him a chance at redemption is Charlie, an old friend and veteran of the international cocaine trade, who is preparing with his gang what could be their last, gigantic score before retirement: the arrival of three tons of Colombian cocaine near Marseille. Charlie allows Jérôme to follow them from the inside, camera in hand, living with them in a modest house on the outskirts of Marseille.

As the shipment draws closer and the police tighten the net, the suspicion of a possible infiltration triggers an unpredictable spiral. Alliances become fragile, trust turns into a form of paranoia, and violence can erupt at any moment.

What begins as an immersive reportage gradually turns into a journey into a criminal universe dominated by paranoia, violence, money, and a code of conduct that is as rigid as it is constantly on the verge of collapsing. Among old gangsters, young criminals, police officers who actually come from law enforcement, and a journalist who films and simultaneously participates in the reality he is documenting, the boundary between observation and fiction becomes increasingly blurred.

Pierrat thus constructs a criminal mockumentary in which reality seems to continually infiltrate fiction and fiction contaminates reality, making it almost impossible to establish where reportage ends and staging begins.

There are crime films that tell stories about crime and films that instead attempt to show its mental form. Moolah, Jérôme Pierrat’s feature-film debut, stages the mental form of crime. It is not so much a film about organized crime as an immersion into its psychopathology: into the way in which a particular form of existence ultimately alters the perception of risk, time, death, trust, and even reality.

The result is a compelling, nervous, mad mockumentary, constantly on the verge of losing control. A cinematic object that is difficult to classify, in which reportage, investigative journalism, crime fiction, and authorial incursions overlap until they become indistinguishable.

Pierrat knows the world he depicts from the inside. He is a crime reporter and, as he explains in the interview, for years he has worked immersed in the criminal world, showing in his documentaries only a small part of what he saw. Fiction then becomes, paradoxically, the necessary tool for getting even closer to reality: not to invent it, but to finally show what documentary could not allow him to show.

Fiction here is not the opposite of reality, but the device through which reality can become more visible.

The camera seems never to have a stable position. It is a reportage camera, a smartphone, a hidden camera; it observes, follows, moves, loses its subjects, finds them again, physically enters situations. There are no, or seem to be no, traditional corrective devices of cinematic staging. Pierrat says he wanted to avoid artificial shot-reverse shots and overly perfect camera movements, seeking instead a «raw», dirty image, capable of preserving even the actors’ stumbles and the overlaps in the dialogue.

From this choice comes a remarkable sense of absolute present. We do not have the impression of witnessing something that has already happened: it seems as though the film is happening before our eyes.

And this is precisely what makes the progressive dissolution of the boundary between truth and fiction so powerful. The reporter does not merely simulate documentary: he brings into the fiction people who have actually inhabited that world. The gangsters are played by genuine veterans of organized crime, while the police officers are real former law-enforcement agents. Pierrat himself plays himself, turning the journalist in the story into his own cinematic double.

It is a formidable short circuit: criminals play criminals, police officers play police officers, the journalist plays the journalist, and fiction continually takes on the consistency of a document.

But Moolah truly becomes interesting when it ceases to be simply a film about crime and begins to question the particular psychic structure of its characters.

These men seem to live in a permanent state of excitement, alertness, and threat. Their existence is organized around danger. Paranoia is not an occasional pathology: it has become a perceptual mode. They must constantly anticipate betrayal, foresee aggression, read a potential enemy in others. Pierrat puts it with extreme clarity: living in that world means constantly having in mind the possibility that your partner might kill you at any moment, or that you might end up in prison for decades. It is an almost existential condition. And yet, in one of the film’s most disturbing contradictions, these men also seem to need that condition. Normality bores them. A regulated life appears almost unbearably devoid of intensity. Risk then becomes another drug, perhaps deeper than cocaine itself: a way of feeling alive.

From this point of view, Moolah could be read as a film about addiction to danger.

Crime is not merely what they do. It is the nervous system within which they have learned to live.

Their so-called «criminal intelligence» largely coincides with an intelligence of survival. Pierrat speaks of an «animal instinct», of the ability to read people quickly, to immediately recognize who they are dealing with, to react even before rationally developing a strategy.

But this is precisely where the paradox emerges: the instinct that makes them capable of surviving is also what makes them incapable of living.

Their existence is in fact continually oriented toward what can destroy it. They put their bodies, their freedom, their relationships, their friendships, and even the very possibility of a future at risk in order to obtain money. It is not simply a matter of greed: it is something more radical. Money becomes the organizing principle of existence.

And the title, Moolah, declares this without ambiguity. The director explains that the film was initially supposed to be called Money: old criminals, young criminals, the journalist, and even the police officers are all connected, in different ways, by money. It is what brings them together and, at the same time, what drags them toward the precipice.

Money is therefore much more than a narrative motive: it is a minimal metaphysics, a miserable divinity around which everyone organizes their relationship with life.

And this is where the film becomes surprisingly broader than its criminal subject: in the gangsters, in an exaggerated and pathological form, it is something that also belongs to contemporary society: money is the measure of all values.

These men have simply taken this to the extreme. They carry to their ultimate consequences a principle that often remains hidden in ordinary society; the difference is that they no longer conceal the mechanism, whereas ordinary existence hypocritically conceals it.

There is almost no distance left between desire and action, between impulse and consequence. Violence becomes an immediate response, and impulsiveness a form of existence. Pierrat insists precisely on this: gangsters do not wait, they do not necessarily devise sophisticated strategies; they often act. They are «street smart», ruthless, capable of seemingly senseless decisions.

Their psychopathology therefore does not consist solely in violence. It lies in the progressive loss of proportion between cause and consequence. Two thousand euros can become enough to kill. A suspicion enough to betray, an insult enough to destroy a friendship.

A drug shipment is worth putting one’s own life into question. The scale of values has become distorted.

And this is precisely why the violence of Moolah is more effective when it is not shown head-on. Brutality then becomes almost an ontological possibility hovering constantly within the image.

This makes the film nervous not only in its editing and camerawork, but in its very perceptual structure. The spectator is forced to share, at least partially, the characters’ paranoia: they never know exactly what is staged, what is improvised, who knows what, who is watching whom. Reality becomes a criminal territory. And cinema becomes a form of documented surveillance.

In this sense, the decision not to judge his characters is also extraordinary. The interest is not to construct a moral discourse, but to show authentic human behavior, leaving the spectator to formulate their own judgment.

These criminals are not icons. They are not the mythological gangsters of American cinema. They are men who eat, cook, watch soap operas, laugh, become moved, get bored. Then they can kill someone. It is this contiguity between the ordinary and the atrocious that is truly disturbing. Pierrat says he knows people who go on holiday, to weddings, and to funerals with criminals like those in the film; friendly and amusing people, capable of becoming moved in front of the television and at the same time of killing, escaping from prison, and trafficking drugs.

Normality, then, is not the opposite of monstrosity: monstrosity is perfectly capable of inhabiting normality, transforming existence into a game. These characters seem to have progressively sacrificed all of this in exchange for an existence of heightened intensity.

This is also where the film’s extraordinary formal originality comes from. Moolah does not simply tell the story of a world in which reality is unstable: it constructs a cinematic form that makes reality itself unstable. Pierrat’s camera does not simply observe chaos.

The mockumentary becomes something more sophisticated than a mere documentary parody. It is an epistemological device: it calls into question our ability to establish what we are watching.

And when the spectator begins to wonder whether a particular situation is «real» or «acted», the film has already achieved its deepest result.

The criminality it depicts is real, the people who portray it have actually inhabited that world, the violence running through the story belongs to the reality the director knows, but cinema recomposes it, alters it, amplifies it, and transforms it.

And so Moolah ultimately becomes a kind of neutral zone between document and invention, where cinema does not reproduce reality but makes it strangely more visible.

The criminal world then appears simultaneously incredibly distant and scandalously close.

It is a world we imagine as separate from ours, governed by incomprehensible codes and populated by pathologically different individuals. But Pierrat shows us instead that these men live within the same society, in the same houses, on the same streets, within the same everyday relationships. They are, as he himself says, our neighbors: «an adventure» taking place right outside our front door.

So the experience becomes one of looking closely enough at them to recognize, beneath the pathology, the human impulse; beneath the violence, fear; beneath the paranoia, the need to survive; beneath the criminal obsession, a convulsive and unpredictable physical dimension.