“We didn’t want to make a movie with a dark ending”

On the eve of the Russian premiere of the film “Murder Mystery” its director Dominique Moll answered questions Julia Shagelman.

– Your film is based on the book by Pauline Gena “18.3 – a year in the judicial police.” How did she get your attention?

— This book was written after the author spent a whole year with the criminal police of Versailles, near Paris. She talks about the daily work and life of the police, which is nothing like crime novels and films. Such an inside view is always interesting, especially looking at a subject that you actually know very little about, like in my case, about police work. But the first thing that hooked me was the quote on the back cover, which said that every police officer at some point in his life is faced with a case that becomes an obsession for him and which he cannot “let go”.

Why did you choose this particular case?

– In the book, these are the last two chapters, fifty pages out of five hundred. It just tells how one of the detectives turned out to be practically obsessed with this case, especially because they could not find the killer. From this image of an obsessed investigator and from the fact that the criminal was not caught, I started off.

And when we started working on the script with my co-author Gilles Marchand, we realized that we were talking about the murder of a young woman. So our film also talks about the broader theme of the violence that men do against women.

– I think you took a certain risk, telling a story with such an open ending. Were you sure that the audience would agree to follow you, knowing that they would not get an answer to the question of who killed this girl?

– Yes, there was a risk, but in the end it worked, in France the film was quite successful, we received very good reviews from both critics and the public. It seems to me that if you shoot a movie all the time according to one scheme, then all the pictures will turn out the same. So there comes a time when you need to try something different. In crime stories, there are indeed clear rules of the game: at the beginning a crime occurs, at the end the criminal is found, everyone is happy and satisfied. But by refusing to act on them, we gave the audience the opportunity to pay attention to other aspects of this story – for example, this constant routine violence between men and women, the different standards with which we approach them, the desire to blame the victim, and so on.

– In your opinion, is the success of the film connected with the current fashion for the true crime genre? Is this direction generally popular in France, like, for example, in the USA, where there are a lot of podcasts, documentary series and the like about real criminal cases?

— Yes, true crime is quite popular in our country, especially on Internet platforms. And it has such a dangerous charm that the more horrendous the crime, the more attention it gets and the more people become obsessed with it. But our murder, firstly, was never covered in the media, no one, in general, knew about it, except for the police and the relatives of the victim. It’s not some serial killer acting or anything like that. Of course, it’s still terrible, but it’s not something that flashed in all the news. Therefore, I think most people took it as a completely made-up story. And from the very beginning we approached it this way, although there are real facts in the picture.

I think one of the main reasons for the interest of the audience was that the film talks about the feminist side of the issue. This is a topic that now worries people more and more, fortunately, more and more attention has begun to be paid to it. The picture shows a man’s world: most of the police are men, and at the same time they investigate crimes committed by men, and this makes them ask themselves uncomfortable questions. However, we received a lot of feedback from women, too, so I hope we were able to present their point of view as well.

– With the actor Bastien Bouillon you work for the second time, and he again, as in the movie “Magic of the Beast”, plays a policeman. Does he have a face like that for an officer of the law?

– I do not specifically take him to play the police, it’s just a coincidence! In “Magic of the Beast” he was such a good-natured bumpkin, a village detective, but here his character is completely different. This is his first major role, and I hope that his career in France will be successful in the future. What was important for me in him, or rather, in his hero, is that he does not speak much, and the actor must show what is happening to him very minimalistically, with his eyes, facial expression. You can see that he tries to control his emotions because he does not want to become like his partner Marceau, who just takes everything out on you. I think Bastien did it very well.

– In the final picture, his hero – the investigator still receives a certain “release”. He did not find the criminal, but he freed himself from this obsession, albeit not completely. How much do you believe in the possibility of such an outcome for him?

“I don’t know how far you can say that he is free, but at least he has progress. We didn’t want to make a film with a gloomy ending, they say, we didn’t find the killer, everything is bad, the world is terrible and it’s useless to even try to change something in it. It was interesting for us to show the evolution of this character, Johan, how he changes, especially when he talks to the few women that are in the picture: the victim’s girlfriend, the judge, the new police officer. They help him find new energy to keep working on this case, because that is his duty. We had this idea, this image, that Johan rides in circles on his bike all the time. In the final, he manages to finally break out of this circle and go forward.