justice

Belgian director Jan Verheyen takes on the fundamental absurdity of country’s acquittals by ‘procedural error’.

Belgium
4*

Director:
Jan Verheyen
Screenwriter:
Jan Verheyen
Director of Photography:
Frank van den Eeden

Running time: 110 minutes

Original title: Het vonnis

It is always much more fun when a film asks us to sympathise with a murderer – to see the murderer as the victim rather than an aggressor – rather than the actual victim. Not only does this strategy keep us on our toes, because we continually ask ourselves whether we may allow ourselves to form such a counterintuitive opinion, but also whether, as a character in the Belgian The Verdict suggests, such an argument would “open the floodgates to barbarism” by undermining the rule of law and creating a slippery slope for anyone to commit heinous crimes for any reason and get away with it.

It is not an easy terrain to navigate, but armed with a script that simultaneously gives the impression of being both comprehensive and activist, director Jan Verheyen asks a very fundamental question about one of his country’s most debated legal issues – one that continues to wreck lives, if we are to believe a final title card, for the sake of maintaining the house of cards that would allegedly collapse if any of its parts were removed or ignored.

Verheyen makes no secret of the fact where his sensibilities lie. The film opens with the loving couple Luc Segers and his wife, Ella, at a fancy corporate gala event where it is rather obvious the CEO has handpicked him as his successor and is about to ask him to accept the offer. Luc and Ella leave with their 6-year-old daughter, Anna, and stop for gas on the way home. Ella goes across the road to buy bread, but at the vending machine, she is assaulted and left unconscious. When Luc finds her, he confronts the assailant, but when he is also attacked, his daughter runs across the road and is hit by a car. Luc wakes up three weeks later from a coma to find he has missed the funerals of both his wife and his daughter.

However, the worst is yet to come. Luc recognises the murderer, but he is set free after a “procedural error,” a missing signature on an important document, is discovered. It is easy to imagine where the story goes from here, and it is a lot of fun, especially because the director has chosen a few comical faces, like the dry prosecutor-general (brilliantly played by Jappe Claes) with the enormous bat ears who inadvertently helps the defence and the bumbling justice minister who repeats the same stock lines of written statements every time something terrifying happens on his watch.

Once Luc’s trial gets underway, things really start to heat up, as legal experts on television explain the gravity of getting to the bottom of this question about “procedural errors” and whether anyone may ever be pronounced “not guilty” if they have admitted to the crime, just because they had their reasons for acting the way they did. And what if the man who murdered Luc’s wife in cold blood by beating and kicking her countless times also had his reasons for doing what he did?

The Verdict skirts this grey area in the advocates’ closing arguments, although our questions about just where the line may be drawn are left unanswered. This may very well have been the intention of the filmmaker, who wanted to start a conversation rather than provide us with all the answers. These procedural errors, that final title card tells us, are a well-known problem in Belgium today, and yet they have remained unaddressed.

A bit like The Life of David Gale, this film proudly wears its intentions regarding questionable practices in the legal system of the real world on its sleeve (in the case of the 2003 film by Alan Parker, the issue was the problem of the death penalty). However, while it may be regarded as activist, it is also difficult to deny the power such a topic has to convince us that things are not as black and white (or as “factual”, as the film’s prosecutor-general puts it) as we would like them to be for the sake of simplicity.

There are many shots at the beginning, looking straight down from a great distance, that seem to imitate God’s point of view, but they also create enormous tension because they give the impression of a bad omen rather than any kind of comfort. For the rest of the film, these shots are absent, perhaps as a nudge toward the importance that people deal with their problems themselves rather than expect a higher authority, whether on earth or in heaven, to intervene.

Such creativity is also at work in a few unexpected flashbacks that occur during the trial, but a recurring image, which also opens the film, is a closeup on Luc’s trembling hand after he committed the act. We see the same shot at least three times throughout the film, which is frankly unnecessary as there is no real doubt that he committed it as a last resort, almost despite his own moral values.

But the film’s greatest flaw is one it just barely makes. The viewer wonders how everything will turn out in the end, because it seems there are only two possible outcomes, and we would see either of them right before the end credits. The film doesn’t do this but instead gives us a firm closing that is not at all unlike a television episode, whereas it would have been much more effective to leave the ending open and ambiguous and confront the viewer with the aggressive but factual title card immediately afterwards.

As the work of a filmmaker with an evident passion for his subject, The Verdict is a powerful mixture of message and execution.

Viewed at the Festroia International Film Festival 2014.

Rape victim seeks to understand reasons for assailant’s behaviour, but despite creativity, depiction ultimately just skims the surface of complexity.

Argentina
3*

Director:
Santiago Mitre
Screenwriters:
Mariano Llinás
Santiago Mitre
Director of Photography:
Gustavo Biazzi

Running time: 105 minutes

Original title: La patota

There are always at least two sides to a story where more than one person is involved, and in the case of Paulina by Argentine filmmaker Santiago Mitre, looking at and weighing all the sides can be discomfiting to anyone intent on clinging to black-and-white beliefs. The exercise may even produce immense confusion in the viewer looking to reconcile all these points of view.

The film itself is not confusing; on the contrary, even though it sometimes jumps back in time to cover events once more but from a different perspective, the story is very simple: Paulina, who has started her Ph.D. in law and is also the daughter of a judge, has decided to leave Buenos Aires and head back to her hometown in the Northeast of the country, close to the border with Paraguay, to teach human rights and democracy at a small school. The children, most of them of indigenous heritage, are sceptical of her presence, and the first classes get off to a bad start when Paulina seeks to discuss the concept democracy and is quickly confronted with a different outlook from these children who feel that white Argentines do not or cannot represent their needs in the system.

One night, when Paulina drives back home on her motorcycle, she is attacked. Suddenly, without warning, the film flips back on itself to show us characters we had not seen before. A young man, Ciro (Cristian Salguero), who works at a sawmill, learns that his girlfriend has broken up with him to hook up with a man from outside the community. He is outraged, and when he sees someone driving a motorcycle in the dark, he takes it to be her and encourages his friends to rape the woman.

This is where the film’s path converges with the previous storyline, as we see Paulina mistaken for the girlfriend and her being gang-raped by the group of boys, most of whom attend her class. The tense build-up, covered very competently by the director and his cameraman, who use short takes that positively vibrate with adrenaline, as well as the shocking incident itself, leaves us stunned, but Paulina’s subsequent actions turn the film into an unexpected examination of the different ways in which people can respond to the same events.

At the centre of the story is Paulina, who feels a desperate need not only to teach but to understand the people in this community. This understanding, we come to see, extends to her rapists and their situation, as well as a questioning of the rationale for punishment as meted out by the law. Her personal life takes a major hit, as well, because of her way of dealing with the fall-out of the rape, but she is determined that the cold rules of the law not be applied to people if the judicial outcome is more or less as pointlessly cruel as the act itself.

Such thinking sends her father, who had his hopes pinned on her to follow in his footsteps, flying into a rage, and we can understand his concern for his daughter’s personal and professional situation very well. On the margins, there is also Paulina’s boyfriend, Alberto (Esteban Lamothe from Villegas), who finds her drifting away from him with every new revelation.

At the same time, it becomes clear throughout Paulina’s arguments that she is the one who should decide over her own life, just as the people affected by the government’s decisions should also be allowed to decide on their own rules. The film does not answer the question whether one should intervene if someone makes a “wrong” decision but instead highlights the fact that people have their reasons, and just because we do not understand them does not make them irrelevant.

Paulina is at its best when it shifts the audience’s empathy between the father and the daughter, and the departure from the linear narrative is effective in this regard, although it would have had a greater impact if it had been used more than just a couple of times. As things stand, it seems more like a gimmick, which is unfortunate.

The film handles its difficult material, including the brutal plot elements of a rape and the mulling of an abortion, but also the marginalisation of a community with little formal education, very competently. There is also fertile ground for discussion, especially about Paulina’s decisions along the way, which seem ever more difficult to comprehend, both for those around her and the audience.

In its effort to create ambiguity by showing us the world is more complex than we might like to believe, however, Paulina only skims the surface of a number of important issues. Had any one of them been exploited with greater care, this may have been an engaging film worthy of deep reflection, but instead, its reluctance to dig below the surface rather than merely hint at the turmoil makes this an incomplete production, well-intentioned though it certainly is.

Viewed at the San Sebastián International Film Festival 2015

Celluloid Paradiso

The Verdict (2013)

Paulina (2015)