The Giscard movie, “A Day in the Country” (“1974, une partie de campagne,” a pun: also “A Day in the Campaign”), set a definitive tone for Depardon’s career, as the first of many films in which he gets behind the scenes and shows what’s usually out of public view. Those films are inextricable from the question of access and its implications, both practical and legal—and the resulting tensions energize Depardon’s filmmaking aesthetic. In his most imaginatively conceived films he confronts fearsome systems of power—law and violence—and his terms of access to those systems forge the projects’ artistic form.
Take, for instance, his 1988 documentary, “Emergencies,” a masterwork of the genre, filmed in the E.R.s of a Paris hospital’s psychiatric ward. The bulk of the movie is set in intake rooms where potential patients are evaluated by medical professionals; hovering over their questioning is the possibility of patients’ involuntary hospitalization, whether for observation, protection, or treatment. The stakes of the exchanges are maximal: some individuals are accused of crimes; other are enduring mental-health crises that endanger their livelihoods or social standing; still others have been brought to the hospital as a result of suicide attempts. Trauma lurks in the background—sexual violence, family conflicts, substance abuse, solitude, the threat of deportation. The film’s artistry emerges in large part from the constraints of his shoot inside the hospital: Depardon (who does his own cinematography) is forced to film from only a few angles in a few tight spaces, and that compression both sharpens the interactions he captures and symbolizes the legal and medical power being brought to bear on the subjects. The filming requires, above all, a reserved, noninterventionist method, and Depardon turns that method into a cinematic style. (His first film on the subject, “News Items,” from 1983, involves a police station and its officers—but, strangely, his wide-ranging access on that project left the images relatively slack.) In “Emergencies,” his camera sits on a tripod or is handheld with minimal movement; frames remain static for extended periods of time. The effect isn’t passively observant but, rather, rigorously formal, embodying Depardon’s own concentrated engagement and demanding the same involvement of viewers.
With “Caught in the Acts,” Depardon rarefies this method further. In France, a person who, per the title, is arrested during a supposed criminal act is brought to an interview with a prosecutor—with no defense lawyer present. Depardon received permission to film such interviews at a courthouse in Paris (with the accord of individual suspects). His presence is so recessive that the resulting footage, however cannily composed, looks, for the most part, like it was made by an unattended surveillance camera. The interviews are presented in extended takes, with minimal editing, mainly via jump cuts. They are filmed in side views, with the suspect and the prosecutor facing each other across the official’s desk—but this compositional symmetry is the only thing equal about the discussions taking place. The prosecutor recites the official version of each case and asks the suspect for his or her version of events. A young and hearing-impaired man with a somewhat bewildered air, who committed many small offenses but had never been imprisoned, is now legally an adult and is terrified to learn that he may face jail time for stealing a bag from a car. A man arrested for running a game of three-card monte tells the prosecutor that the police offered to let him go if he would inform against big-time gamblers or pimps, a betrayal that he fears would amount to a death sentence.
Some of the suspects try to minimize their actions with euphemisms or paraphrases; others do so with explanations that the prosecutors find utterly implausible. Some deny the charges outright, while others confess freely. As filmed by Depardon, the clashes reveal a radical disconnect between the representatives of the law and the people accused of breaking it. One prosecutor suggests that an addict leave Paris and move someplace where drugs are unavailable (he corrects her, explaining that there’s no such place); another responds sarcastically to a young man who claims that the police beat him into a confession. The film reveals racial inequities, too, as suspects who are preponderantly not white are brought before prosecutors who almost uniformly are. But what the pressurized interviews yield, above all, is a historical disconnect. The accused bring with them the burdens of poverty, addiction, isolation, physical or mental illness, and the relentless stress of exclusion. The interviews are filled with a litany of these troubled personal histories, which come across as sentences unto themselves. Late in the film, after a long and tense shot of a man being brought in handcuffs to a prison cell, Depardon cuts to an exterior view of the courthouse, with pedestrians going by. The breath of air, and the freedom of movement, only reinforce the moral asphyxiation taking place inside—and emphasize the unyielding authority sustaining the city’s public life.