User Reviews

Gregoire Duval (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) is a mild-mannered pharmacist in a small town in the French countryside. The time is 1962 and, as has been going on for sometime now, the Algerian question is still rocking France.

Duval is fishing along a small canal next to a dozing friend, the local police chief when suddenly; Mr. Duval hears a loud argument coming from a nearby hay barn. He watches as Khader Boualam (Lahcen Ruzougir), a young Algerian man stalks away in an angry huff.

Curious, Mr. Duval goes into the hay barn only to find a very pretty young blonde girl putting on her dress and jewelry, she is startled when she hears Mr. Duval behind her and explains that she has just had an argument with her boyfriend but is otherwise OK.

Mr. Duval tries to comfort her. She does not want to be comforted and very quickly, this scene degenerates into an attempted rape, but when the girl starts screaming loudly, in order to shut her up, Duval strangles her to death. This murder was not really intentional, but it was not entirely accidental either. Mr. Duval returns to his dozing police chief friend just in time to catch a large carp.

Later on, we learn that the dead girl has been found and that her Algerian boyfriend has been picked up on suspicion of murder. But we know and Mr. Duval knows that this young Algerian is innocent.

But truth, justice, innocence and guilt are not on the minds of the people in this town. Everyone from the local judge to the prosecutor to Mr. Duval's wife Genevieve (played with icy menace by Isabelle Habiague) can only think about how they can exploit this crime to help further their own careers or standing in the community.

I mean, it should be a complete open and shut case, everyone knows that Boualam is hot tempered and that he probably killed the girl in a moment of passion, which, while making the crime understandable, doesn't mitigate his guilt. The actual trial will just be a mere formality observed on the way toward a verdict of guilty for the Algerian.

Then to make matters worse for Boualam, Mr. Duval is selected to be on the jury, which will have the task of listening to the evidence and coming up with a pre-ordained guilty verdict.

But here's where Jury Duty begins to really surprise you. Since (other than his defense counsel), Mr. Duval seems to be the only person in the courtroom who actually wants to prove that Boualam did not commit this murder, despite a lot of circumstantial evidence to the contrary.

So in a surprise move, it is Mr. Duval who contradicts eyewitness testimony and points out obvious flaws in the prosecutions case. It's like having a Lieutenant Colombo as juror number seven. But, the question remains, will proving that the Algerian is innocent lead to everyone discovering that it was actually the town's pharmacist who committed this heinous murder?

Jury Duty plunges us into the world of Mr. Duval and his somewhat distracted family with remarkable brevity and just when I thought I knew where this film was going to go next, it didn't and went in a completely unexpected direction.

Now, I have no way of knowing if the real procedures in French courtrooms are like they are shown in film, but it doesn't really matter, the film makes dramatic sense and put me in the peculiar position of rooting for a psychopathic killer as he tried to prove the innocence of an Algerian sacrificial lamb and alternately hoping he also gets away with murder himself.

I suppose that's what made me feel a little bit cheated at the end and its "Hays Code" finale. Not to the point where I won't recommend that you see Jury Duty, but I will say that the denouement is not very satisfying, but everything else that happens is funny, intense and thought provoking.

If you're a fan of courtroom films or police procedurals or even murder mysteries, then Jury Duty will work for you. It has a great story that kept me guessing, great performances from the entire cast and a nice professional look that I appreciated. All in all, a pleasant time spent at the movies.

Francis Didelot's fine novel was adapted for the screen in the 1964 film of the same title, and directed by Georges Lautner. It featured an inspired Bertrand Blier as the provincial pharmacist at the center of the story. This new take on M. Didelot's novel is credited to Didier Le Pecheur, and directed by Edouard Niermans.

Gregoire Laval, a tormented man, is one of the upstanding citizens of the Alsatian town. He has a passion for fishing, something he shares with his friend, the police chief. Since the fish are not biting, Gregoire decides to take a walk. He hears screams coming from a barn nearby and sees a man leaving the place. Gregoire decides to see what was happening inside, but he is not ready for the gorgeous young woman who evidently had a sexual rendezvous with the man he saw. Gregoire tries to force himself with the girl, with fatal consequences.

What follows is a psychological drama that centers on Gregoire's mind going through different stages of guilt. An innocent Algerian immigrant is caught by the police as the murderer. Everything is against the poor man, who happens to be in the France of the 1960s when the Algerian conflict was being fought, so he was an easy prey. Gregoire feels he must come clean, but his wife, who has been an unwilling accomplice to a prior crime, decides his good name and his reputation must be kept, at all costs.

As the trial begins, Gregoire is included in the pool of possible jurors. To his amazement, he is chosen as the juror number 7. Gregoire tries a bold approach in creating a distraction, as well as asking questions from the witnesses as well as the defense and prosecution that points out to the accused man's innocence, to no avail. The prisoner will have to die for a crime he did not commit. Gregoire's conscience dictates he must do something about it, although it is too little and too late.

Mr. Niermans gets good all around performances from his cast, especially Jean Pierre Darroussin, an actor that continues to do excellent work every time he appears in movies. His Gregoire Laval is a man carrying a secret that is destroying him slowly. Isabelle Habiague is also at her best as Genevieve Laval, the woman who is aware of her husband's crime and his past, but who decides to do everything in her power to maintain her status in the small community.