La Femme flic

The young inspector Corinne Levasseur gets into trouble for questioning a drug dealer without the prosecutor's authorisation and is transferred to a small town in the north. The town lives under the control of a wealthy industrialist and his family, and Corinne is handed work nobody takes seriously. The strange death of a young girl catches her attention and she keeps the investigation going although nobody wants her to. The trail leads to a prostitution network using children and to the names at the very top of the town. Yves Boisset was among the most outspoken of the French directors making political crime films at the end of the seventies and the start of the eighties; his films often rest on real files and aim straight at institutions. Here too the matter is not one guilty man but a whole town choosing silence. Miou-Miou plays the character tired and stubborn without making her a hero. How a woman police officer is received both by her colleagues and by the town is the strand the film handles best.