Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2018

[Chris Knipp]

RAYMOND DEPARDON: 12 DAYS/12 JOURS (2017)



Law and mental illness in France examined at a key choke point

By French law, anyone admitted into the hospital without their consent must be seen by a judge within 12 days. That judge must decide whether these psychiatric hospital patients can be allowed back into society. As Richard Brody of The New Yorker puts it, Depardon "sees the hearing room as a distorting mirror for civic life at large." The patients mostly request to be released, and it is not granted. Some of the patient-victims seem simply to have fallen through the cracks, and on the face of it to be no more crazy than many who live free. And this is troubling if not enraging. An important subject, but the film is repetitious and limited, and the famous documentarian Depardon might have found a more revealing, more complete, approach. This is what one sometimes feels with the exhaustive, exhausting, and ultimately hypnotic American documentaries of Frederick Wiseman. He tortures us with a selfless thoroughness that is in fact stylized limitation.

12 Days/12 jours, 82 min., debuted at Cannes May 2017; ten other festivals. Screened for this review as part of the Mar. 2018 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center, New York. The film has a continuing run at Anthology Film Archives.


Raymond Depardon after screening