The Young Lieutenant (Le petit lieutenant)

Xavier Beauvois's new French policier Le Petit Lieutenant conscientiously eschews virtually everything we've come to expect from the genre: high-concept crimes, formidable villains, bitter Bogartian heroes, action, intricacy, ethical crisis. Beauvois, who co-wrote, seems hellbent on making the most realistic cop film of all time, shruggingly consumed with downtime, small talk, minor incident, and dead ends, and he's succeeded -- the narrative wouldn't have cut it in a Kojak story meeting. Strangely, this workaday glimpse of cop work-life, in which transferred young detective Jalil Lespert joins the Paris crime unit, along with recovering-alcoholic division vet Nathalie Baye, isn't even a character study -- Beauvois's people largely keep to themselves, and drama is fastidiously avoided. Rather, as the small team of cops search for a few Russian emigrés that may or may not have tossed a homeless man into a canal, it's a window on an ordinary experience, without ultra-naturalistic movies' tendency to fetishize detail or poeticize emotions. Tragedy, when it comes, does not involve us -- we're kept at arm's length through to the final retribution, when we assume we have a bead on Baye's mournful frame of mind but actually know very little. That's realism.