The Girl with a Bracelet

The Girl with the Bracelet. The title is misleading, suggesting a 17th-century Dutch painting, when in fact it refers to a teenager who has to wear an electronic tag. 18-year-old Lise (Mélissa Guers) is accused of murdering her best friend and is living under supervised release, with an electronic tag attached to one of her ankles. Director Stéphane Demoustier takes pleasure in maintaining the opaqueness of his narrative, the mystery of his characters and the doubts of the spectator until the very end. The film’s opening shot, on a sunny beach – a father (Roschdy Zem), a mother (Chiara Mastroianni), their young son (Paul Aïssaoui-Cuvelier) and their teenage daughter, Lise, whose games are interrupted by the arrival of the police – deceives us. The remaining ninety minutes, set in confined spaces, show the protagonists isolated, separated from each other by the glass separations and furnishings of a courtroom. In the family home, everyone tries to live as normally as possible. Although the bonds have not been broken, the family unit has disappeared. With the rigour inherent in the legal process (tight framing, structured shots, precise exchanges), the film presents a succession of interventions by the prosecutor (the formidable Anaïs Demoustier), the defence lawyer (Annie Mercier) and the presiding judge (Pascal-Pierre Garbarini), as well as witnesses, plaintiffs and the accused’s entourage. The trial aims less to provide answers than to fuel doubt. What it investigates is not so much the murder in question as the secret side of the teenager suspected of having committed it." (Véronique Cauhapé; Le Monde)