A goofy cop tries to convince a nice witness that he’s a murderer in an absurd interrogation. Crime grotesque from France.
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The guard
Comedy • 18.08.2021
• 9:55 pm
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A detective who doesn’t give up, a witness who tells the same story over and over again, and a murder who absolutely refuses to be solved: that sounds like a classic crime chamber game, but it is only partially. Because the French Quentin Dupieux made the film “Die Wache”, an artist who has devoted himself to absurdity with strips like the killer tire satire “Rubber” and the shrill senselessness “Wrong”. The long-term interrogation in the police station is flanked by a whole series of strange events that not only torpedo the establishment of the truth, but also the audience’s sense of reality. ARTE is now showing the film from 2017 on free TV for the first time.
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Everything about “Die Wache” is grotesque, starting with the police station, which, painted in every imaginable shade of brown, is more of a gloomy prison of thought than a place of enlightenment. In this depressing environment, Commissioner Buron (Benoît Poelvoorde, “The Brand New Testament”) feels pretty comfortable. He is a self-declared tough dog and enjoys the power that he has by virtue of his badge. But: Buron is, objectively speaking, not the brightest. Only his one-eyed assistant (Marc Fraize) is foolier, who with his verbal senselessness drives the selectly polite witness Fugain (Grégoire Ludig) completely insane.
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Fugain had found a body three days ago and alerted the police. Since then he has been a prisoner of madness, which spreads around the station because Buron suspects him of murder. Again and again, the inspector has the events of the fatal night told, types the protocol with two fingers into a rickety typewriter, philosophizes about nibbled Mars bars and tries on the phone to organize a private appointment with reasonable success.
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“I’ve never been so terribly bored during an interview!” Buron bursts out at some point. Which is no wonder in view of the banalities that he repeatedly demands from his pitiful counterpart.
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You have to trust yourself to do so much empty chatter. But even if the words that director Dupieux wrote in the script are mostly empty shells, they still serve a purpose: to create maximum confusion with increasing hysteria. Every now and then a few more characters burst into the absurd interrogation situation, all of whom have only one goal: to tighten the Kafkaesque noose around Fugain’s neck. Even more: as a viewer, you also get a grotesque update of reality. At some point you can no longer distinguish between what is reality and what is illusion.
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The watch – Wed. 18.08. – ARTE: 9:55 p.m.
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Those: teleschau – the mediendienst GmbH
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