Another documentary on Outreau, twenty-two years after the start of the investigation in this suburb of Boulogne-sur-Mer?
Seventeen years after the last six acquittals?
Yes, and even if we learn nothing fundamentally new about this case of pedophilia where the tsunami of delirium has swallowed up a kernel of truth, the authors, Agnès Pizzini and Olivier Ayache-Vidal, offer a new and interesting perspective.
Storytelling quality
The strength of their film is based on the quality of the narration (the part of Pizzini) and on a singular device (the discovery of Ayache-Vidal) which escapes the clichés of the genre.
Reenactments - daily life with the Delay-Badaoui couple in the HLM de la Tour du Renard housing estate, interrogations with the examining magistrate, in particular - were filmed in a setting in which some of the thirteen acquitted are invited: the priest -worker Dominique Wiel, Daniel Legrand, Thierry Dausque, bailiff Alain Marécaux.
There they meet the actors who play their role and this disturbing face-to-face highlights the irrational side of the judicial shipwreck.
Because justice could not have been misguided, by noting very quickly that several children who were authentic victims also accused innocent people - never forget that four adults admitted their crimes and were definitively condemned at the trial of Saint-Omer.
The proof by Jean-Marc C. who, according to D., one of the little Delays,
"gave money to my father to show us manners"
(the expression used by kids to talk about rapes).
Indictment confirmed, like all the others, by D.'s mother, Myriam Badaoui.
pathetic argument
However, the one that the little boy describes as a cruel and insatiable pervert, is in reality a mentally and physically handicapped person incapable of accomplishing what he was accused of.
No need to be a doctor to realize this - the investigating judge will use this pathetic argument before the parliamentary commission to justify his refusal to receive Jean-Marc C. after his arrest by police officers from Boulogne-sur-Mer them puzzled themselves.
For the record, the magnificent testimony of Mrs. C., mother of the fake pedophile, before the assizes of Pas-de-Calais, had stunned the court, placed abruptly before one of the most flagrant errors of the judicial system.
Also for the record, Jean-Marc C. came out of the procedure by the grace of a psychiatric dismissal: although dragged in the mud for months, he was therefore never cleared in the full sense of the term.
Heartbreaking testimony
Admittedly, the fate of Thierry Dausque is even more painful: this inhabitant of the Tour du Renard unjustly spent 1,178 days behind bars - it is the acquitted who has undergone the longest pre-trial detention.
His testimony in front of the camera is heartbreaking.
In contrast, that of Didier Beauvais leaves you speechless.
This magistrate presided over the chamber of instruction of Douai, the control body which obstinately validated the procedure of judge Fabrice Burgaud when it went into a spin in an obvious way and it was enough to read certain minutes with head rested to be alarmed.
Police officers from Lille tried, in vain, to stop the runaway train.
We see that Didier Beauvais regrets nothing, or very little, and that arouses dread.
“Justice is both an idea and a warmth of the soul.
Let us know how to take it in what is human, without transforming it into this terrible abstract passion which has mutilated so many men”
: when Albert Camus wrote these lines in 1944, he was not thinking of the Tour du Renard.
But it is certain that none of the protagonists of the small judicial world involved in the treatment of the Outreau file had read them.
