Polisse

It's hard to believe this fast-paced, sometimes gut-wrenching look at the Children's Protective Service agency in Paris, is a scripted film! All of the performances are so realistic and every moment of the action on screen seems so authentic, it's no wonder it won the Jury Prize at Cannes. This powerhouse film is part of the 2012 Seattle International Film Festival and it pulls NO punches in the gritty, repugnant work these law-enforcement people must do.

In addition, it makes crystal clear the cumulative effect this kind of work has on the workers! No one can be confronted with homelessness, incest, rape, child abuse and other horrors, day after day without having emo- tional scars. These affect their marriages, their families and their friend- ships. We see infidelity, anorexia, divorce, shattered nerves and suicide while we watch the activities they use to try to decompress. (One of them is a really GOOD dancer!)

Conversely, they can't help but see the wacky thought processes of some of their clients: A teenage girl who was caught orally "servicing" a teenage boy, explained that he had her cell phone and she was earning it back. One of the law-enforcement agents asked what she would do if it was a laptop! It turns out that she was working her way through the whole gang of boys because "It's a SmartPhone!" Whereupon some the agents got such a bad case of the giggles they had to leave the room, while the girl can't see what's so funny.

Please take a look at this trailer (English captions) and see if you don't agree that this looks more like a documentary than a scripted film!

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Here is a link to the trailer:
http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi872522521/
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