Ten years after his last film, À moi seul, inspired by a court case, Frédéric Videau continues in the criminal theme with According to the police, where he depicts an institution abused. From the disturbing intentions of staging to the cloudiness of its purpose, this feature film intrigues by its facticity. Missed.
According to the police: an above-ground social deconstruction
One morning, a gruff cop nicknamed Ping-Pong burns his police card in the toilet of his police station. Tired of his condition, he left the institution. From this matrix act is built an immersion within a Toulouse brigade, where reigns the disarray of disillusioned agents, machismo and injustice. Their names are Zineb, Delphine, Tristan or Drago. They have only one thing in common: they are police officers and worn to the core. Abandoned to their fate by a negligent state and public opprobrium, these peacekeepers operate in an unhealthy and profoundly inhuman sphere. Following the departure of Ping-Pong, the stabilizing agent of this rickety microcosm, their destinies explode. 
It had been ten years since Frédéric Videau had registered his name as a film director. In À moi seul (2012), he transposed to the Dordogne, the real Natascha Kampusch case, where a little Austrian girl had freed herself from her kidnapper eight years after her abduction, with Agathe Bonitzer surviving in the clutches of Reda Kateb.
On-board spectator
Passionate about the legal-criminal framework, he naturally returns with a film on the police institution. With a clear goal of deconstruction, According to the Police starts on quite intriguing grounds. From its introduction, the strong images mark the mind: a charred cop card, a swollen teenager, a glare blue and a man who gives up. At the appearance of its title, the work then falls in love with a structure based on point of view. For a day and a night, we will follow, as an embedded spectator, the various fortunes of the characters. But after these first promising moments, very quickly, something is wrong in According to the police. Starting with a tone problem. With a miserly staging in motion, the sequences push the cursor of theatricality to heights of discomfort. With its dialogues riddled with clichés and their awful declamation, the work disturbs by its lack of anchoring. The facticity of this universe is increased tenfold when, on several occasions, Frédéric Videau devotes himself to stylistic effects that are sorely lacking in subtlety. Yet classiously filmed and lit, the film suffers from rigid shots, which does not facilitate emotional involvement. 
Thus, the filmmaker locks himself into a filmic asceticism where the characters marry their mortifying condition for two hours, without the slightest rhythmic dissonance. In a structure reminiscent of Gus Van Sant's Elephant or Paolo Vizi's The Opportunists , Frédéric Videau is embringing on a repetitiveness of situations with the same depressing rope, when it would have been wise to mix human gazes or to reveal a spiral of despair.
Antisocial
And if this extremism could have given a poignant work on the police condition, on a structure in perdition representative of state violence and the proliferation of inequalities, it will never be mentioned in According to the police. An ambition that, de facto, is deeply disturbing. Because the film only summons this social imagery at rare moments: a young man from the suburbs is harassed, then beaten for arbitrary reasons, a cop has to sleep in a hotel for financial reasons or the brigade badly welcomed in a city. So many situations that are difficult to understand as they lack real substances and scopes. In addition, the peregrinations seem to tick so many "mandatory" boxes to respect his original pitch that it becomes difficult to believe the slightest "shock" scene. In this footage, the whole is infinitely weaker than all the parts. 
According to the police , however, has nothing to be ashamed of for certain qualities. In the absence of a background of deep clumsiness, the plasticity is engaging, especially thanks to a very beautiful photography. Playing on the opposition of red and blue (also referring to the republican pennant, except white), cinematographer Céline Bozon (Marguerite et Julien, Félicité) gives a stamp of attraction to this cold and wobbly work. Similarly, when situations finally give us a little respite, privileging human setbacks to bad counter theater, a certain poetry escapes. All this, highlighting fabulous actors: Alban Lenoir, Laetitia Casta Sofia Lesaffre and the too rare Simon Abkarian of course, but especially the charisma bomb Patrick d'Assumçao, who pierces the screen with his contained rage. Commendable in its intentions but undeniably unsuccessful in its execution, According to the Police is a disappointment. The coldness of its staging and situations, little helped by dialogues in the form of tragicomic belching, reverses the dynamic of deconstruction for an above-ground film, with limited sensitivity. The only light among the darkness, the solar charm of actors who sign, for some, one of their best performances. Too little to recommend this work that misses the boat with an artistic and social thunderclap. Sad missed opportunity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GT0nYGXihLM
