Anne Fontaine is back -- with another terrific, timely and important film -- NIGHT SHIFT

If I had to pick one of the most under-rated filmmakers currently working, I would suggest, at the top my list, the Belgian-born, César-winning writer/ director Anne Fontaine (shown below), who, over her nearly 30-year career, has given us a wonderful variety of fascinating and varied movies of differing genres (often mashing genres together to unsettling and unusual effect) that are as thought-provoking as they are entertaining. 

From Dry Cleaning (which was the first of her films that I saw) and How I Killed My Father through The Girl From Monaco, Coco Before Chanel, My Worst Nightmare, Adore, Gemma Bovary, The Innocents and now NIGHT SHIFT (Police was the film's original French title), Ms Fontaine consistently upends our expectations while sucking us into stories that entertain, surprise and unsettle.

How, at this particular point in time, might a filmmaker induce her audience to feel sympathy for, of all things, the police? Yet by the finale of Night Shift, TrustMovies felt as though no movie he could remember had enabled him to empathize more fully with the three members of the Paris police force -- two men and one woman -- whom we meet here.

Who these three are, their relationship to each other and to the man (Payman Maadi, above) they must escort to the airport (he is a political prisoner seeking refuge who is now being sent back to his home country to face possible torture and death) is all that we learn during the film, but the details of character and background, as well the events we witness, keep us glued as well as constantly adjusting our perspective, just as do these very human and even humane police.

The three officers are played by the excellent actors Virginie Efira (above, left, and most recently seen here in Sibyl), Grégory Gadebois (below, right, whom I've seen previously in smaller roles; he's the standout here), and Omar Sy (above, right, and currently turning heads and hearts as the star of the Netflix series Lupin). All three are quite wonderful in their roles, as they slowly and very surely reveal their lives and their complexity via mostly quiet scenes of work life and home life -- the latter affecting the former despite each officer's attempts to prevent this.

It's that work life, however, that nails it for the audience, as our three "heroes" meet the prisoner they are about to escort and have to piece together the "facts" of the situation. Yes, he could be a terrorist, but he is most likely not. So what next? By this time, we know enough about these three "workers" to fully understand and appreciate the conundrum in which they find themselves. 

How all this plays out also plays to Ms Fontaine's particular filmmaking strengths. Her movie is remarkably satisfying in the manner that it refuses to make anything too easy. It leaves open so many doors and yet allows us to use our own imagination in ways both broad and small so that what might happen and what does may not be impossibly far apart. This is a consistently engrossing, surprisingly humane view of a situation horrendously difficult, despite its being increasingly commonplace.

From Distrib Films US and distributed on DVD via Icarus Home Video, the movie hit the street this past week -- for purchase (and eventually, I hope, for rental, too).