“Chicken Fries”: A story cooked in Belgian sauce

The meaning of “the world” – to see

Born in 1985, the Franco-Belgian documentary television program “Strip-tease” has been showing the tragicomic tics of our daily lives for more than thirty years. Each episode has its own setting: “Marchands de Tapie”, a business school founded by a famous businessman; “600 Grams of Hash”, about the failures of the youngest and most ambitious film producer; “Holiday Homework”, at the seaside club leaders training…

These morality films had nothing short of our failings, our failed ambitions, our obsessions, our bad taste and our pretensions, until in 2012, many viewers waved the red flag of voyeurism after the broadcast of Desperately Seeking a Shepherd, in which a lonely farmer was duped by a Romanian suitor and the day He finished with inconsolable sorrow.

A direct and atmospheric dive into the police station and tough neighborhoods of Brussels

Lacking the small screen, the founder of the show, Jean Libon, turned to documentary cinema in 2018. In Neither the judge nor the obedientThe film co-starred Yves Hinant as Anna Groves, a caustic lawyer who doesn’t mince words in her investigative office in Brussels. We find him this time with Commissioner Lemoine in a documentary film noir (not so common in cinema) called Restavit. Chicken fries : Kalima Sissou, an occasional prostitute, was killed in her own home. Circumstances seem to point to the guilt of trained executioner and former lover Allen… but the boy remembers nothing. Everything rests on a frying pan: evidence must be analyzed or spit out.

Vintage survey

Filmed in black-and-white, this Belgian thriller takes on “strip-tease” specifications. No commentary, no interviews, no specially composed music, but a direct and atmospheric immersion into the police station and the difficult neighborhoods of Brussels. One of the first shots tells us all about the social hardship: the police, the medical examiner and the judge go to the crime scene to rest the body. The matter is serious, but there is no proper workplace. It will be skate hard shallow.

Made for television in the early 2000s, left behind for twenty years, then edited while in prison, this vintage investigation focuses on the relationship between the commissioner and the accused, as opposed to artificial twists. On one side, a bemused policeman with a questioning eye and a furrowed brow, recalling the stubbornness of photographer Francis Apestegui, can be seen journalists, by Raymond Depardon (1981), on the other hand, falsely innocent or falsely guilty, ravaged by drugs. Here’s the beauty of the film: their relationship gradually transcends the pre-interrogation square, thanks to a heart-wrenching complicity that leaves the irony of “striptease” to keep it ticking.