36 Quai des Orfèvres
111'
France
IFFR 2017
Diane, a student, is recruited by the DGSE, France’s external intelligence agency – while Pierre, a criminal, is recruited in prison by a terrorist organisation killing in the name of Islam. Both are mere munition to their respective recruiters/handlers. Two times, two parallel lives doomed to intersect. A sardonic, typically Philippe Haïm abstract meditation on the way all radicals are closer to each other than they would like to believe, as well as the treacherous nature of clandestine lives.
A text at the end of the film states that the DGSE has been able (implicitly, due to all the duplicitous dealings shown here) to thwart more than a dozen terrorist attacks. That was 2008 – before Charlie Hebdo, the Black Friday of November 2015, Nice… which is to say that nowadays the upshot of the film reads in a different way: counter-terrorism is a losing game, despite the occasional wins.
IFFR 2017