We
are all guilty, myself more than the others,"
said Dostoyevsky in the introduction to
"Crime and Punishment." The quote
is used to set the stage for Serge Le Péron's
L'Affaire Marcorelle, a psycho-drama
featuring a prosecutor who suffers from
nightmares and walks the line between dream
and reality. Like
many of his predecessors, Serge Le Péron
came to directing after nine years as a
member of the editorial committee for Cahiers
du Cinema (1976-84).
After another five years (1986-90) as a
columnist and editor-in-chief for the magazine
"Cinéma Cinémas,"
he joined France 3 to make a series of documentaries
and fiction-documentaries for television:
De La Terre À La Lune (From
Earth to Moon, 1989), Sesame Ouvre-Toi
(Open Sesame, 1990), Le Nouvel
Ennemi (The New Enemy) (1994), L'Affaire
Spaggiari (The Spaggiari Affair,
1997), Bruay: Histoire D'un Crime
Impuni (Bruay: the Story of an Unpunished
Crime) (1998), and Musiques De
Films: Joseph Kosma (Music For Films:
Joseph Kosma) (2000).
"During the last few years I have made several
documentaries," said Le Péron in
an interview, "one of which was about the
Bruay affair in Artois [it was] set
in the early 1970s, the period of the so-called
'red judges'. In this affair the judge Pascal
presented himself as defending the cause
of the people against the bourgeoisie, and
he was supported by the Maoists of the period."
In this documentary, as well as
in The Spaggiari Affair, Le
Péron recalls meeting a lot of judges
"who were protected by their rituals, their
class, their caste, their culture." True
justice is thus placed in question.
In
The Marcorelle Affair, prosecutor
François Marcorelle (Jean-Pierre
Léaud) meets Agnieszka (Irène
Jacob), a Polish girl, on a lonely night
in a restaurant in Cambery and accompanies
her to her room. Immediately, a series of
bizarre events lead to the murder of a man
but did Marcorelle commit the crime?
He believes so until his doctor
friend convinces him that he is living
a chronic nightmare, and that the crime
never happened at all. Not convinced,
Marcorelle looks for proof and
one afternoon, he finds what he's looking
for in the darkness of a movie theatre.
Ron
Holloway
