Watch Polisse For Free

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

i can't believe this movie is only rate just about 7. it should be around 9. i understand that no one has the same feeling towards anything. but this movie is definitely a must watch.i read some reviews that acting was bad. really? do you see any American movies with this kind of acting level at all? i would say generally European actors and actresses are just way above. i thought acting was so flawless, i didn't feel like i was watching a movie. and all movies must be like this. you should not feel like you are watching a movie. it must becomes a real situation around you.story is meant to be like this. it is like a montage of their everyday job. i can't believe so many people nagging about there is no cohesive story. really? then how do you watch any TV show? they are pretty much independent of other episodes. or anything else really...and i really wish i could understand french better. i am sure that actual french script is much vulgar than the subtitles.i particularly love the scene where they laugh their ass off when the girl told them that she was doing it to get her phone back. i actually laughed as they laughed. it shows you that they (CPU) deal this kind of ridiculous thing everyday. i never visited this kind of institution, but when i went to police station few times, i witnessed some crazy and ridiculous things like this. and i didn't stay there for hours. i am very sure CPU would actually get some absolutely crazy stuff everyday. they laughed because it is a laughing matter. that is what the movie is telling you. a minor girl should not do such thing just to get her phone back. OK? i also read that someone watched this movie with a social worker. and they hated this movie. i actually don't understand why. as mentioned above, when i went to police stations, i saw multiple officers doing things with a criminals or victims. i see that this movie the director tries to make the office a little more cheerful than it really is. i bet this kind of offices are actually dead serious and boring. but i don't get why this is such a far fetch from the reality. maybe the director wanted to depict the whole thing (office environment or whatever) as a different thing.if you are a fan of "Gomorrah", then you will love this movie. i rate this movie as high as that movie. and in fact, both movies are based on true stories.this is a movie. not a real documentary. OK? although it was based on a true story, nothing in this movie is real. so take it as a movie, not as a documentary. and even documentaries have some fake or false information. it is impossible to make anything 100% real, unless it is real. OK? LOVE this movie so much!!!

The film starts out as an interesting pseudo-documentary about the French Child Protection Services, and it seems sort of like The Office. Unfortunately the film then drags on for another 90 minutes as it jumps from vignette to vignette (abused child, abandoned child, etc) while you get to see a massively dysfunctional arm of the police department yell and function incoherently. If I was their boss, I would've fired about half of the people in that office long before movie ended.The drama is hugely overblown in the film, but unfortunately it is not funny in any scene, even when the director tries to make it so, as when the -entire department- starts making fun of a girl who was sexually abused after her cell phone was stolen. Other ridiculous scenes (although there are so many): • Fred taking off the glasses of the (unnamed?) weirdo photographer, then letting her hair down? It's like out of some 1980s teen comedy, but done here to supremely awkward effects.• The CPS people abusing a girl who just gave a stillborn (or possibly aborted) baby a few months after being raped.• So, so, so many unexplained character interactions, e.g. between the weirdo photographer and her baby daddy. Why is he taking care of their children? Why does he seem like a child molester himself, but then this plot is never, ever developed at all? Why is she hiding from his gaze when she leaves her apartment, across the street? None of this is even remotely explained. The photographer's romance with the guy on the squad is incredibly overdone and unnecessary.• Why did they think it was a good idea to bring along someone with horrible anxiety issues to an undercover gem smuggling operation? No one was like "this girl who freaks out by saying 'hello' should probably not be playing a central role in the operation"?There are many more. I don't seem to be nitpicky, I can enjoy movies with some plot holes, but this film is an entire series of partially explained character interactions. It's the film equivalent of Lost. Stop introducing character development if you're not going anywhere with it, good lord. I get that nothing is really 'resolved' when you're working with Child Protection Services, but even that point is not gotten across very well.I've seen worse films, but would definitely not recommend this to anyone. I did not previously know that Luc Besson was a pedophile and molested this film's director when she was a girl, but it's also unfortunate that she didn't make a better story about child abuse, given her own history. C'est la vie.

I had been looking forward to seeing this film and knew that it had gotten good reviews by critics who I respect. But after seeing it, I am not on the same page. My review may stand out on IMDb as in "which one of these is not like the other". I did not find it funny, nor thrilling, nor a triumph of acting. It's true that this is a star-studded cast, however, there is also a lot of overacting going on. What I saw made me wonder why such frat house behavior among so-called professionals drew IMDb user raves and 13 Cesar award nominations and a Best Film win at Cannes.And then I tracked down Mick LaSalle's San Francisco Chronicle review and he gave me the perspective needed to understand this film. It is this: Maiwenn Le Besco was the model used for Natalie Portman's film debut (at age 12) in The Professional. Maiwenn came to the attention of that film's director, Luc Besson, at age 15 and had his child at age 16. It all makes sense when viewed through that lens.The officers of the children's protective services unit often seem to not like children at all, let alone view their job as one of protection. They are unbelievably rude to children and adults alike, physically violent to the people they bring in for questioning, openly mocking & humiliating of adolescents who've been coerced into sexual acts, have a perpetual chip on their shoulder as to their wider standing within the police force, overreact to most everything, and seem to spend an inordinate amount of time having meals and drinks and evenings out with each other as a group. Many of the user reviews chalk this up to some sort of battle fatigue in a group who takes their job so, so seriously. It seems to me, however, that this is a group of people with open disdain for much of the rest of the population, and each other, and they seem to have the opposite reaction to specific cases as one would expect from a professional investigative officer: hysterically leaping en masse into a citywide search for a woman who has taken a child, perhaps her own, vs. lovingly telling the boy whose coach molested him that the man might one day return to coaching because prison time will have taught him that what he did was wrong. This only makes sense from the perspective of someone who has personal experience with her voice being diminished by those who should have protected her.I notice also that some reviews comment on the ending making no sense and being really rather terrible. It is hard to know which piece of the ending they are speaking about but let me just say that, to me, that last bit with Iris was the most real part of the entire film. I totally understand every aspect of that. Especially with Mick's insight.

At any given time there are upwards of a dozen French actresses - spanning several decades - working in cinema, any one of whose name on a marquee is sufficient to draw me to the box-office irrespective of whether the given actress is working with unknowns or with a cast of her peers of both sexes. In the second decade of the 21st century the pickings are rich; Danielle Darrieux, who made her name in the thirties is still with us and worked as recently as 2010, Micheline Presle, who rose to prominence in the forties is always prepared to don the old slap any time her daughter, Toni Marshall directs a new film, Jeanne Moreau, first seen in the early fifties remains fully active and from the sixties we have Catherine Deneuve, arguably the doyenne of present day French cinema. After Deneuve the deluge, Isabelle Huppert, Nathalie Baye, Fanny Ardant, Isabel Carre, Carole Bouquet, Sandrine Bonnaire, Mathilde Seigneur, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Cecile de France, Nicole Garcia, Agnes Jouai, Valerie Lemercier, the list goes on. It was an actress who drew me to Polisse; when I turned up at the cinema all I knew about Polisse was that it featured Karin Viard, what I didn't know was that it also featured Marina Fois and Sandrine Kimberlain and above all this I didn't know what it took me five minutes, tops, to realize, that it was a GREAT film with an equally great ensemble cast that includes writer-director Maiwenn. It has the authenticity of a documentary and one reviewer here has compared it to Le Petit Lieutenant, a reasonable comparison although I tend to think of it in the same breath as L.627. No matter, Polisse stands alone as a record of the Child Protection Unit in Paris and Maiwenn gives us the whole thing from soup to nuts, from the child victims to the adult abusers to the tight-knit unit seeing human sorrow and human evil day after day, week after week and often unable to remain aloof. It's actually quite a long film but it seems like only minutes such is the power of the ensemble. Ten stars going away.