A garbage man finds a body with HIS knife—then forgets if he's the killer. French noir meets identity crisis.
Damien and his friends are garbage collectors in a small provincial town. One day, Damien finds a decomposing corpse in the dump where he works, but also a knife that turns out to be his. Because of his personal and social environment (an omnipresent mother, humiliating friends, an unenviable situation) and because he arrives at a moment in his life when he realizes that he is nothing to anyone, Damien wants to prove that he is capable of doing something with his life, of becoming someone, by finding the murderer who is prowling around the dump. In the course of his investigation, he meets Julie, a young divorced woman who is a little lost and who moves in across the street from him. But as his investigations progress, Damien wonders if he is not the killer he is looking for.
Acting
Buchholz simmers with crushed-dignity energy throughout
Direction
Gauthier turns garbage dumps into existential hellscapes
Writing
Ambiguous guilt that refuses tidy resolution
Director
Yvan Gauthier
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Early 2000s French crime cinema was obsessed with working-class masculinity in collapse—this fits between Baise-Moi's nihilism and the later Dardenne humanism.
Christopher Buchholz is son of German actor Horst Buchholz (The Magnificent Seven); this role was his attempt to break from pretty-boy typecasting into damaged antihero territory.
FR
