Taut, tough, gritty, realistic French policier (no background music to pump it up at any point) picks up the title character at his graduation from the police academy and doggedly follows him to his first assignment as a plainclothesman in Paris, to the receipt of his first gun, to his first corpse, first autopsy, first case, an unglamorous mugging and murder likely committed by a couple of lowlife Russian immigrants. The straight-ahead, flat-footed narrative, however, conceals an odd, awkward, tricky structure. Every now and then the film veers off from our eager young rookie (Jalil Lespert) onto a private detour with the soi-disant "Madame Supercop" (the biggest name in the cast, Nathalie Baye, in an economically eloquent performance), a respected veteran, daughter of a "Monsieur Supercop," back on the streets after two years at a desk job while she battled alcoholism. Somewhere in the middle, right when the case takes on a new urgency, the focus switches entirely to her, with the Little Lieutenant removed to the sidelines, although keeping his claim on the film's title through his significance to his replacement protagonist, just the age her son would have been had he not died of meningitis in childhood. (Not in any degree "super," Madame Cop shows herself to be all too human.) The balance, in the early stages, between these two characters could have been more deftly handled by director Xavier Beauvois, who also plays a supporting part as a Right-leaning cop; but the case itself, continuing to plow straight ahead, is satisfyingly worked out with rising stakes, rising suspense, rising emotion. The only deflation in it is the thought at the back of your mind of how unimaginable this sort of thing would be in the Hollywood of today, as opposed to the Hollywood of half a century ago. It would now need to be injected with enough extra voltage to electrocute itself. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd
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