The story’s timing is instructive: Most of it takes place in 2016, shortly before the rise of a #MeToo movement that, in Europe especially, will encounter both resistance and support. What emerges from this particular case is an expansive study in collective misogyny - the kind of free-floating contempt for women that holds sway over Clara’s small hometown as well as this institution of ostensible law and order. Even the seasoned crime-fiction aficionado will be reminded here of not just the trauma of murder but also its invasive, disruptive power, the way it brings even tangential secrets into the open and turns the police into professional airers of dirty laundry. He has a way of infusing even standard procedural tropes - the scouring of the crime scene, the breaking of the news to devastated parents and friends, the endless stakeouts, dead ends and false leads - with an unexpected gravity and emotional power. Working with cinematographer Patrick Ghiringhelli and editor Laurent Rouan, Moll tells the story with atmospheric sweep (the mountainside scenery provides a beautiful, desolate chill) and an unhurried flow. That’s putting it more politely than some of the men do, whether it’s the former co-worker (Baptiste Perais) who describes Clara as a clingy side-piece or the smug domestic abuser (Pierre Lottin) who claims she liked it rough. Nearly all of them were (or claim to have been) romantically involved at one point or another with the deceased, an attractive young woman with a seemingly unquenchable passion for life and love. The same is true of the various creeps Yohan and his team will interrogate over the course of their long, frustrating investigation into Clara’s death. But from the way Moll cuts through the crowd, I think he also means for us to scan the faces of Yohan’s colleagues, to register their boisterous, clubby energy and to notice, crucially but hardly surprisingly, that nearly all of them are men. The scene plays at first like routine exposition Yohan, the new head of the homicide unit, will be our eyes and ears on the investigation into Clara’s killing. Mere hours before the attack, a group of police detectives is celebrating a colleague’s retirement and welcoming his much younger replacement, Yohan (Bastien Bouillon). The director Dominik Moll (“With a Friend Like Harry … ,” “Only the Animals”), who wrote the script with his regular collaborator Gilles Marchand, introduces us to those investigators at the outset. It’s a horrifying assault, deeply personal in its brutality - the killer whispers her name beforehand - and it haunts you, much as it haunts the investigators who spend weeks, months and ultimately years trying to earn Clara a measure of justice. In a scenic valley near Grenoble, a 21-year-old woman named Clara (Lula Cotton Frapier) is walking home late one night when a faceless assailant emerges from the shadows, douses her with gasoline and sets her ablaze. And you desperately want it to be solved, given the particular monstrousness of the crime. The gripping, sobering French procedural “The Night of the 12th” begins with an admission of defeat: The ripped-from-the-headlines homicide case we’re about to observe, it tells us, will remain unsolved.
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