[D66] 12 Jours review – a devastating glimpse into broken souls

[A.O.]

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/may/25/12-jours-review-raymond-depardon-documentary-psychiatric-hospital-judge
http://www.allocine.fr/video/player_gen_cmedia=19573013&cfilm=253727.html
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6777114/
http://www.lemonde.fr/cinema/article/2017/11/29/12-jours-une-chambre-d-echo-aux-detresses-contemporaines_5221789_3476.html
https://www.arte.tv/fr/videos/079755-000-A/12-jours-dans-un-hopital-psychiatrique/

12 Jours review – a devastating glimpse into broken souls

     By Wendy Ide, www.theguardian.com
     View Original
     May 25th, 2017

Raymond Depardon’s documentary follows a judge who must decide whether 
psychiatric hospital patients can be allowed back into society

A young woman stares across a table at the judge who is reviewing her 
case. Her gaze is both searingly intense and curiously blank. Holding 
herself preternaturally still, muscles tensed against the turmoil of 
emotions, she pleads to see the two-year-old daughter who has been 
removed from her care. “Not all the time, I accept that. But just to 
change her diaper, to love her.” If there’s a more achingly sad moment 
in any film of the 2017 Cannes film festival, it’s hard to imagine what 
it could be. For 12 Jours, veteran documentarian Raymond Depardon 
(Modern Life, Journal de France) turns his lens on to the desperate, 
broken souls of the patients who have been involuntarily committed into 
the care of a Lyon psychiatric institution.

By French law, anyone admitted into the hospital without their consent 
must be seen by a judge within 12 days. The cases of long-term patients 
are also assessed on a regular basis. The patient, accompanied by a 
lawyer, sits on one side of a table in a hospital office; the judge on 
the other. And the conversation between them will determine whether they 
can be allowed to take personal responsibility for their own liberty.

Depardon protects the identities of the subjects by changing their names 
and other details, but their faces are shown. The extraordinary level of 
access and intimacy begs the question, if someone is not deemed fit to 
leave a psychiatric ward, can they really agree to participation in a 
documentary? It’s a legal and moral conundrum and it is part of a larger 
issue which looms over any factual film which focuses on the most 
vulnerable members of society. However empathetic the approach and 
honourable the intent, questions of consent and the spectre of 
exploitation lurk at the edge of the frame.

Moral questions notwithstanding, this is a remarkable piece of work. A 
brittle woman, voice choked up by the tears that fall as soon as she 
starts to talk, is stretched to breaking point by her work. She is glad 
to stay in the hospital, acknowledging that she needs to heal. “I’m an 
open wound,” she gasps.

All the other patients ask to leave. One, a young woman hollowed out by 
a lifetime of loneliness, wants to go home to kill herself. Another says 
he has a political party to start, funded by Bernie Sanders, which is 
going to “wipe out psychiatrists”. Another, a hollow-eyed 20-year-old 
man who slurs through a list of paranoid delusions in agonising slow 
motion, ends the interview with a promise to become a professional 
footballer when he gets out. The camera rests on the face of the judge 
for a moment as he looks into a future which is likely to include many 
things, none of which will be professional soccer.

The distressing momentum of scrutinising shattered psyche after 
shattered psyche is broken up, firstly by slow shots that roll through 
the corridors of the hospital like a gurney, and secondly by three 
sections of wrenchingly lovely music, composed by Alexandre Desplat. 
It’s a quietly devastating film.