Oh Mercy [Roubaux, un lumière] (Arnaud Desplechin, 2019) (Patreon)

[CONTAINS SPOILERS]

To say that Desplechin's latest film is "odd" would be accurate, but misleading. Odd is a word that can imply some sort of quirky effort from an auteur we know well, an instance of an artist giving in to his or her most idiosyncratic tendencies. As some have pointed out, Desplechin's most notable artistic tic is his restlessness, a sort of narrative ADD that results in films that moves in fits and jerks, going off in all directions and containing a lot of stray ideas that don't necessarily cohere. (In my old Online Movie Nerd Discussion Group, the joke was that Desplechin's films were "bursting with fruit flavor.")

Instead, Oh Mercy* is odd because it moves in two directions at once. It's simultaneously the most conventional film Desplechin has ever made -- it's trying to be a classic policier -- and a film so overstuffed and disorganized that it demonstrates that its maker simply doesn't possess the ability to play it straight. The depressing thing about Oh Mercy is that it in no way comes off like a genre subversion. Instead, it feels like a botched TV pilot, a sign that Desplechin attempted a project for which he simply doesn't have the chops. It's never really boring, but it's also unfocused and, ultimately, empty.

Oh Mercy is about a central police precinct in Desplechin's hometown of Roubaix. Like your standard cop show, there is a stationful of detectives buzzing about, exhibiting their different temperaments, but the absolute anchor of the precinct, and the film, is Capt. Daoud (Roschdy Zem), an Algerian immigrant whose ability to exist as a liminal figure (fully French, but also Arab) provides him with an almost eerie unflappability. While there is no denying Zem's  charisma -- he has the natural, easy-going star power of Denzel Washington; the screen adores him -- Desplechin comes dangerously close to making Daoud a magical figure, with the subsequent racial undertones.

At the start of the film, our attention is divided into various cases / subplots. There's an arson that eventually leads to the murder of an elderly woman; there is a guy who has faked a carjacking for insurance money; there is a young girl who is the latest victim of a serial rapist; and a 17-year-old North African girl has gone missing and Daoud is helping her parents locate her. This sort of striated storytelling is perfect for series television, but Desplechin zeroes in on the A-plot (the arson / murder), eventually tying up the other scenarios as throwaway afterthoughts. They are there simply to signify "busy urban policing," and Oh Mercy can barely even handle them in that basic capacity.

From about the midpoint on, Desplechin goes all-in on the homicide, jointly committed by two twenty-something women in a troubled relationship. The result of an ill-conceived robbery, the murder by strangulation was probably initiated by Claude (Léa Seydoux), the "dominant" one of the pair, but her somewhat emotionally disturbed, easily manipulated girlfriend Marie (Sara Forestier) accepts equal blame. A great deal of Oh Mercy is spent on trying to get the women to confess, interrogating them separately, and then finally taking them back to the scene of the crime and having them re-enact the murder.

All of this probably seemed structurally intriguing to Desplechin, since you could think of it as a sort of narrowing of our attention, a funneling down to "the truth." In fact, in these final scenes, one senses that maybe Daoud, walking the girls through the crime, is meant to be a stand-in for the film's director, and some parallel is being drawn between detective work and narrative artistry. But there is nothing quite so meta-textual going on here. As Daoud says to his newest officer (Antoine Reinartz) after a few drinks, Roubaix is a town on the decline, and sad, desperate people are making stupid choices out of hopelessness. The majority of Oh Mercy consists of frustrated cops and one nearly-omniscent police captain getting two losers to admit just how badly they fucked up.

*NOTE ON THE TITLE: Onscreen, we see the words OH MERCY (no comma) in gray block letters, with the words Roubaix, un lumière superimposed in white on top. Have fun, Mike.