29 September 2022 15:51
Very pleasant and captivating, intimate and collective, completely feminist and yet universal because it is devoid of any Manichaeism but rather as full of nuances as it is of atmospheres. IS The night of 12 by the French Dominik Moll who, after being presented at Cannes Premiere along with other important titles such as Night exterior by Marco Bellocchio, arrives in cinemas from 29 September thanks to Teodora Film.
Film noir that bypasses the genre, while working considerably on the suggestions that the codes of the genre evoke, is based on one of the cases collected in the investigative book by Pauline Guéna 18.3 – one year at the pj. In fact, every year in France the judicial police (the federal police, pj, which gives the book its title) opens more than eight hundred judicial investigations for murder, and nearly 20 percent of these remain unsolved. But Moll’s film has nothing didactic, even though it is also clear, explicit and with a pedagogical side even more than a denunciation one. It is actually a film about a pervasive negative energy in the whole of society. Which?
“It was actually all of Dallas that killed President Kennedy.” This phrase from Madeleine Duncan Brown who for decades was President Lyndon Johnson’s mistress and mother of his only son, to whom Johnson paid all health care and education costs while he was alive, refers to the insane and negative energy that it pervaded the city – at the time the most violent in the country in terms of homicide rates – and it expresses very well both the theme of Moll’s film and its visual angle. And this is beyond the fact that Duncan Brown’s controversial claims about Johnson’s participation in a plot against the president maneuvered by oilmen and shipowners, from which he was himself terrified, which would have diverted segments of the clandestine operations against Cuba, are true.
Three different connotations
More exactly, The night of 12 is a film about the circularity of evil. But which takes a different connotation than other titles on the subject, whether they are fundamental masterpieces, important works or small but innovative and courageous productions.
Among the first we can certainly put a film that is now a cult, not included at the time: Death runs along the river (The night of hunter, 1955), the only directorial film by actor Charles Laughton in which a preacher on horseback – among the most significant interpretations of an extraordinary actor like Robert Mitchum – is actually the bogeyman, a dark knight who progressively besieges a farm. A merciless film about American Puritanism, it overturns its schematic values of good and evil, of black and white (the preacher wears entirely in black but rides a white horse) and works on symbols to unite the intimate with the dominant culture.
Among the latter we mention another film that works on symbols and allegories but with a completely intimate connotation: The returnthe debut of the Russian Andrey Zvyagintsev and the Golden Lion in Venice in 2003, in which a father returns from nothing after years of absence and brings his two children, one small and one adolescent, on a journey of knowledge and initiation into life it will reveal extremely confrontational and not without violence, both physical and psychological.
Finally in the third category a good example is Hatred explodes in Dallas (1962) by Roger Corman, story based on a book by Charles Beaumont about a racist populist politician who foments a terrible climate of hatred against the black minority and school integration in Caxton, a fictional town in the southern United States (the Italian title, later, is both misleading and fitting). A film of social psychosis, but certainly not intimist, actually conceived in 1961, the first year of the Kennedy presidency, it is a true jewel of a master of series b cinema, intended as a low-budget production but also completely independent both artistically and politically : Corman and his brother had to hire the house to produce it because the majors were scared and, although shot in Missouri instead of the southern states, years later both the director and William Shatner – captain Kirk of the series Star Trek who plays the character of the politician – revealed the bad atmosphere in which the filming took place and the climate of intimidation that affected the promotion at the time of its release. They were nothing short of intruders, mirroring the original title of the film (The intruder).
Here in The night of 12the dimension of the intimate becomes inextricable with that of the collective, up to a sort of photograph of psychosocial reality in the strict sense.
The film would be almost on the verge of hagiography were it not for successive strokes of well-chiseled writing
A girl is killed in the middle of the night on her way home after saying goodbye to her best friend. The spectator sees and does not see the killer, almost a ghost. This mystery will take on a metaphysical connotation, after all this is the characteristic of noir. But immediately we are in the intimate dimension. In that of the girl’s family, to whom the cops bring the news, which destroys a happy family unit in one fell swoop. And in that of the members of the judicial police, with the opening sequence of the agents celebrating the retirement of their superior and at the same time his successor. The baptism of fire, it must be said, the new young boss with a sweet look and few words will have it the very next day when he will be detached with his men to investigate in that small place where the terrible murder took place.
It is all very human and very simple and the cops are captured by the director in their simplicity of people continuously immersed in terrible and painful events. The film would be almost on the verge of hagiography were it not that through successive strokes of well-chiseled writing – in terms of dialogues, situations, cut-outs of the scenes, shots that are always perfect – a not so rosy reality emerges in the police community, even if their portrait remains very human and respectful of their interiority. Through the photograph of that world of men only who, as mentioned in the film, investigates crimes committed by men against women, a photograph of the culture and of the male feeling, with its personal pains, gradually emerges, as in the case of the elderly policeman. betrayed by his wife because he wants to get pregnant and ends up sleeping first in the office, then by his young boss.
A male-modeled society
A drift if not from homeless, at least from partial maladjusted, as are the many male acquaintances, transitory and often overlapping adventures, of the young victim. Whether they are narrow-minded young bartenders, black rappers, violent bodybuilders, marginals who live in a shed adjacent to the park where the murder took place, a sad world of young but already old, immature, unconscious and self-centered men is outlined, if not egomaniacs. A world of men only and inversely of men alone, even if not always their fault, in which the best, or least worst part, seems to be that of the bubble of judicial police agents. However, almost all of them reveal themselves to be struggling with the loneliness of affections, feelings, with the failure of their marriages. A bankruptcy world closed in on itself that investigates closed, circular worlds, such as that of the anonymous province. Thus also emerges a photograph of the unconscious, almost natural, machismo son of a society modeled on the male.
One of the great subtleties of the film’s writing, almost an exploit, is to outline the portrait of an uninhibited girl who carelessly loves making love and falls in love easily. In other words, the portrait emerges which, according to the macho logic, would be that of an easy girl who perhaps has been looking for a bit what she has happened to her. Moll gradually suggests to the viewer that it is only a matter of gaze and that if she were a he, her behaviors would be read in another way. And it is the almost desperate cry of her best friend, the one she greeted with a smile on the evening of her death and the only human character among her acquaintances, to restore her dignity, to say she is tired to the policemen who ask and request of her adventures and to remind him that even though she enjoyed both sex and free love, she was a good and caring person that she misses terribly.
But the agents are locked in their circular masculine bubble, as the only female agent with sweet eyes and a curiously androgynous face reminds him, who came to the group at a later time. And yet they are all sincerely shocked and saddened by the story that never seems to want to close by devouring everyone from within, including the judge who pushes the agents to reopen the case years later with new technologies and methods of investigation.
But the real culprit is the male ghost that hangs over the woman, over all women so we could say that The night of 12 it is all the nights, or days, in which women are killed, both literally and figuratively. It is the entire male chauvinist world, in other words, that killed that girl. And the others. For this reason the film, which masterfully combines all the registers on which other works based on the circularity of evil have operated, is structured on a circular obsession, made up of streets full of curves, whether they are traveled on foot or by car, and of which the paradigm is that sequence on the head of the agents who, alone in the night, trains by bicycle on an inclined cycle path, obviously circular, whose gaze changes from sweet to icy obsession. A turn in circles, expressed through a visual leit-motiv that returns in the film once again in a circular way, at regular intervals and that at the beginning interrupts the opening credits. Breaking the circularity is the clear final message.