Le Petit Lieutenant

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Le Petit Lieutenant
Directed by	Xavier Beauvois
Produced by	Why Not Productions
Written by	Xavier Beauvois Guillaume Bréaud Jean-Eric Troubat Cédric Anger
Starring	Jalil Lespert Nathalie Baye Antoine Chappey Jacques Perrin
Cinematography	Caroline Champetier
Editing by	Martine Giordano
Distributed by	Cinema Guild
Release date(s)	8 September 2006 USA
Running time	110 minutes
Language	French (English subtitles)
IMDb profile

Le Petit Lieutenant is a 2005 drama by French director Xavier Beauvois.

[edit] Synopsis

The title character is Antoine Derouere, a young man from the provinces who has just graduated from the police academy. Antoine joins the force in Paris and is assigned to the city's busiest precinct.

Antoine's introduction to police work is rather unexciting. The audience sees him deal with an unruly drunk and take a report from a robbery victim. One day, though, Antoine's unit receives a report that a homeless man's body has been found in the Seine. Not long after, a university professor almost meets the same fate.

As the investigation of the river murder gathers momentum, Antoine's colleagues note a hint of romantic interest in Antoine by their unit commander, Caroline Vaudieu. Antoine laughs off the idea, citing his own lovely (and younger) wife, a schoolteacher who remained in their rural French village.

On one visit home, Antoine tells his father about watching a coroner conduct an autopsy. Antoine says that, as he watched the coroner lay out the victim's internal organs, he thought of Mozart: "How can all that stuff compose music?"

Caroline, meanwhile, is a recovering alcoholic who uses the excitement of the Seine murder investigation as a substitute for the high from liquor.