The Young Lieutenant

Plot

The title character is Antoine Derouere, a young man from the provinces who has just graduated from the police academy. Antoine joins the force in Paris and is assigned to the city's busiest precinct.

Antoine's introduction to police work is rather unexciting. The audience sees him deal with an unruly drunk and take a report from a robbery victim. One day, though, Antoine's unit receives a report that a homeless man's body has been found in the Saint-Martin canal. Not long after, a university professor almost meets the same fate.

As the investigation of the canal murder gathers momentum, Antoine's colleagues note a hint of romantic interest in Antoine by their unit commander, Caroline Vaudieu. Antoine laughs off the idea, citing his own lovely (and younger) wife, a schoolteacher who remained in their rural French village.

On one visit home, Antoine tells his father about watching a coroner conduct an autopsy. Antoine says that, as he watched the coroner lay out the victim's internal organs, he thought of Mozart: "How can all that stuff compose music?"

Caroline, meanwhile, is a recovering alcoholic who uses the excitement of the canal murder investigation as a substitute for the high from liquor.

Cast

Critical response

The Young Lieutenant received generally positive reviews from critics. Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes reported an approval rating of 79%, based on 53 reviews, with an average rating of 6.9/10. The site's consensus reads, "A gritty, languidly paced crime drama that blends old-fashioned ambiance with modern cynicism". At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film received an average score of 71, based on 19 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".

Awards and nominations