Detention is a difficult film to assess as an American. The documentary, which follows trainee corrections officers at France’s National School of the Penitentiary Administration (ENAP), is recognizably a critique, showing the paradoxes of modern methods applied to an ancient carceral logic. But to a viewer from a country where law-enforcement officers are both heavily armed and heavily fearful, instilled with a permanent threat posture and loaded up with military-grade equipment, Detention also makes the French system seem like a relative beacon of progressive values. What, you mean they don’t just tell them to self-soothe by mag dumping into the back of an unarmed nurse whenever they feel a little anxious?
Shot from April to September of 2024, the film follows mostly a single cohort of aspiring screws. The film is edited like a lesson plan: Its 132 minutes (including credits) are divided among 19 scenes by my count, all but one edited down from their classes, self-defense training, and simulations. The trainees, who take notes with colored highlighters, are of all ages, races, and body types; personalities emerge (a budding blue-wall type; a soft-spoken young woman who has an eye-opening first training shift and is never seen again), as they explore theories around the imposition of authority, and learn how it’s exercised in reality. They are subjects first: In the film’s opening scene, an instructor — short, muscular, coiled posture — informs them that they’ll be standing for the entire 3‑hour session, as a sort of test.
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North American audiences were recently treated to a retrospective of the French photojournalist and documentarian Raymond Depardon, including a number of his vérité looks of law and order in action. Like Depardon, Detention director Guillaume Massart acts as his own cinematographer, and fits his material into more mathematically structured films than Frederick Wiseman’s more associative, sprawling institutional portraits. None of Depardon’s films on France’s police, jails, and courts are over two hours, not even his teeming masterpiece Caught in the Acts, and there’s no reason that Detention should be, either, but in this film as in Depardon’s work, the rigor and repetition allows the viewer to chart the divergence of principle and practice.
Many of the classes at ENAP are essentially focused on conflict resolution; French corrections officers are unarmed, so the imposition of a hierarchy is a matter of negotiation, and the first classes sometimes seem like seminars in executive leadership. (Some of the burlier male trainees crack jokes, which are clearly not jokes, about roughing up inmates.) One class, led by a professorial middle-aged woman, goes over hypotheticals about bending rules to pacify inmates — a cigarette after lights-out, to keep things quiet — and how it can on the one hand build rapport and keep order, and on the other hand lead to smuggling contraband, in a session that reads like a lecture on situational ethics, a layperson’s introduction to utilitarianism, and a parable of greed.
Even the courses in ENAP’s martial-arts gym involve reinforcement of the rules around justifiable force and self-defense. (The women sometimes giggle when handcuffing each other.) Yet, after each act break — each scene ends with a hard cut to black except for two, meant to signify a break for a monthlong internship at a real prison — the students return with work experience that challenges and contradicts their training. Most of the problems seem to originate with their more experienced colleagues, who flagrantly disregard the rules, either allowing the prisoners token amounts of drugs, since writeups are such a pain and nothing happens anyway, or, in response to laxity and stifling bureaucracy, callously overusing force. Their, too, begin to acknowledge the contingencies of the profession, caveating their lessons with more and more deferrals to snap decisions and tough calls, either by ignoring regulations or using physical force. And the inherent contradiction of humane and reformist prison regulations meant to acknowledge and mollify the prevalence of suicide, without rethinking or abolishing the system that fosters it, grows ever more acute.
Like Wiseman’s films (and Depardon’s), Detention is not prescriptive, being (again, seemingly, to an American) more ironic and novelistic than overtly ideological in its organization. The peculiarities of human behavior overwhelm the processes meant to contain and solve it. And the film ends with a final scene worthy of Wiseman, who loved concluding his films with displays of absurd pageantry, often ridiculous attempts to reify the social order with speeches and ceremonies. He would have been pleased with the extended ordeal of the soon-to-graduate corrections officers standing in military formation in the pouring rain, herded through a rehearsal of the ceremony like sheep or inmates, forgetting the words to “La Marseillaise.”
