Film Review: The Thread Is French Cinema At Its Best

The Scoop The Thread Daniel Auteuil Palace Films

That wonderful French cinematic aesthetic – let’s call it une certain lingering ecstatic agony makes a dynamite return to Aussie screens this week in Daniel Auteuil’s casually devastating legal thriller The Thread (Le Fil). Based on the real-life prosecution of accused murderer Nicolas Milik, The Thread reaches local audiences after the controversial sleeper hit debuted in May last year at the Cannes Film Festival.

But be warned, mes amis. What follows is a beautifully bleak journey into the jaws of a terrifying French legal system, with no-one but the unkempt, dogged Auteuil and his 1000 scarves to keep us from the guillotine.

From the outset, The Thread merely postures as a courtroom drama. But the 75-year-old Auteuil’s deft accumulation of dread promises an altogether deeper and darker lesson in punishment and crime.

And from the first cuts of a frenetic opening – a glimpse of barbed wire in the grey sky, a police station at midnight – Auteuil sets about establishing the enormity of his antagonist in the institutional machinery of a legal and penal system devoid of reason and dislocated from any purpose or hope.

Voila. It’s the unlovely world of Auteuil’s sufficiently crumpled Jean Monier, a criminal lawyer defeated by time and guilt stuck in the sleepless purgatory of French justice.

Despite being sublimely shot in and around the Draguignan courts, not far from Saint Tropez, this is a south of France few will recognise. Like the brutalist steel and concrete prisons, cul de sacs and courtrooms of its aimless characters, there’s not a lot of warmth, hope and humanity on display.

Instead of wealth, there’s poverty, instead of light there is only the cold grey of an apparently perpetual winter. Instead of (a young) Depardieu, there is only Auteuil.

Empathy, honesty, evidence and reason are notable largely by their absence. The ensuing journey through guilt and innocence is a ponderous, inevitable dice roll. Monier himself is a shadow of a man, but what a shadow.

Riven by his own guilt, the criminal lawyer he used to be tries to stay hidden beneath a gorgeous mane of hair, deep within a luscious scarf that’s wrapped in a giant coat and collar. And yet all we need is Auteuil’s fabulously defiant Gallic proboscis to know that this is a man who will not give in.

Adapted by Auteuil and screenwriter Steven Mitz from the novel by the feted criminal defence lawyer turned author Jean-Yves Moyart, Le Fil tracks the arrest, defence and trial of Nicolas Milik, a father of five charged with the murder of his self-destructive wife.

Played with a painful astonishment by the impressive Grégory Gadebois, Milik is a pathetic, giant of a man who shuffles obediently and bewildered from scene to scene toward the next humiliation. Milik’s stupefied innocence and utter vulnerability become Monier’s clumsy obsession. And it’s not a healthy one.

With a fraught score from composer Gaspar Claus and some precise cinematography from Luc Besson alumni Jean-François Hensgens, the film confirms Auteuil an underrated master of the genre, operating at the peak of his powers.

Elegant in its simplicity, enormous in its moments of truth, The Thread is also a timely reminder of French cinema at its best. Unflinching, unapologetic and very, very well dressed.

The Australian premiere season of The Thread commences 28 August at Palace Cinemas around the country.

Palace Members can access early screenings this week.

Tickets are on sale now!

Website: https://www.palacefilms.com.au/the-thread

Socials: https://www.instagram.com/palacecinemas/