Director: Delphine Girard
Writer: Delphine Girard
Stars: Selma Alaoui, Veerle Baetens, Anne Dorval
Synopsis: One night, a woman in danger calls the police. Anna takes the call. A man is arrested. Weeks pass, justice is looking for evidence, and Aly, Anna and Dary face the echoes of that night that they can’t manage to leave behind.
Delphine Girard’s short film, A Sister, vehemently shook me to my core the first time I saw it in my screenwriting class, with the filmmaker in attendance, a year before the film ultimately got nominated for an Oscar. The script was airtight and masterfully built its tension through Aly’s (Selma Alaoui) exchanges with a police dispatcher (Veerle Baetens), pretending to talk with her sister over the phone, as her abuser, Dary (Guillaume Duhesme), holds her hostage in his car and drives to an undisclosed location.
The context behind their relationship is missing, but everyone understands her pain as she is in desperate need of help before something far worse happens. When Dary is ultimately arrested, the film ends. This abrupt closure leaves the impression to the audience that justice has been served and that everything will go in Aly’s favor once Dary is put behind bars. Of course, the current justice system makes it very difficult for victims of sexual assault to see justice. If it does happen, it usually takes years, and it isn’t as clear-cut as other legal cases.
In her feature-length expansion of A Sister in Through the Night (Quitter la nuit), Girard explores what happens after the events of the short film (after recreating it for the opening scene), as Aly files a complaint for rape and false imprisonment in the wake of Dary’s arrest. At first, she’s interrogated by the police, who believe her recollection of events as true, while Dary vehemently denies any wrongdoing. As legal procedures begin, he moves back with his mother (Anne Dorval), who Dary convinces there is nothing to worry about, as the exchange between him and Aly was consensual.
Meanwhile, Aly has difficulty grappling with her assault, crying alone in her apartment as her daughter helplessly watches, and the police investigation takes (a lot of) time. The dispatcher, Anna, is also having difficulty moving on from the call, as Aly’s situation wasn’t a simple life-or-death phone call. She had to use codified language to get help, not to raise suspicions from Dary. It takes great skill to catch what Aly was saying to “her sister” on the phone, as most dispatchers would have likely hung up the phone, which is part of why Anna can’t bring herself to continue her work as normal.
These moments of intense contemplation are the bulk of Through the Night’s suffocating first half as you watch these three individuals attempt to pretend their lives are normal after an event slowly consumes them. One of them won’t admit guilt, but his mind keeps replaying the night through fragments as if it doesn’t want to believe that he did commit rape, while Aly tries to recover from Dary’s psychological and physical abuse.
Because of its release, the film will likely be compared to Molly Manning Walker’s How to Have Sex, which also dealt with a protagonist who grappled with her assault. While both movies focus on similar themes, and Walker’s film is vastly superior from a visual perspective, Girard’s Through the Night is equally as effective, if not more, through careful screenwriting and editorial choices that elevate the character drama beyond surface-level observations on the characters picking up the pieces.
Scenes where characters recollect events to the police are long but necessary in our understanding of the two protagonists. Alaoui gives a magisterial turn as Aly, whose petrified eyes will stick with me for a long time. It’s not so much emptiness as it is torment, attempting to recover from a harrowing, traumatizing event as life goes on with her child and family. The scene that perfectly represents her anguish happens a bit later in the film, in which she attempts to tell her ex-husband, Pierre (Gringe), what happened but can’t bring herself to do so. The longing in her facial expressions are clear, and the silences in between Pierre’s questions speak so much louder than her own words.
When the movie eventually cuts to two years later, when the trial will take place, many may also compare it with Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, where the prosecution team attempts to twist the phone recording between Aly and Dary during the trial. However, there’s no ambiguity here: the rape happened, and Dary physically assaulted Aly during the phone call when he suspected something. One film leaves the door open for multiple points of interpretation, while the other directly shows how the justice system never favors its victims, even when the crime itself is clear and the police believe them.
When Girard ultimately shows the rape and directly cuts to Dary sitting in his car as his mind fully recollects what happened two years ago while his mother stares at her son point blank, the emotional impact is immensely upsetting. Dary lied not only to the police and judge to save face but also to his own mother – it gets even worse when he tells her he did it without hesitation. It takes an expert like Dorval to react the way she did and make us feel for a loving, caring mother who took her son’s side, thinking he was innocent, only to realize that he is just as cruel, if not worse than Dary’s father (whose innate penchant for violence likely comes from him, though Girard doesn’t directly state to it). With it, she gives her greatest-ever dramatic performance, a layered and emotionally charged turn where her quiet composure is more effective at conveying raw feelings than the relationship she holds with her son.
However, the next scene, in which Anna reveals herself to Aly, is when the emotional buildup of the film fully takes form. With one line, she describes the injustice she will likely face as Dary will live with the guilt he will literally and figuratively carry for the rest of his life. The emotional resonance is devastating and far more poignant than How to Have Sex’s ending, which teased a hopeful future incompletely. After Aly eventually confronts Dary, her life slowly begins to rebuild itself in a more hopeful direction. It’ll take time, but it will happen as the rest of the story belongs to her.
