Sambre on France 2: a fascinating true crime (review)

Jean-Xavier de Lestrade takes the true story of the Sambre rapist to create a fiction that is as sober as it is gripping and above all very impressive.

Even if de Lestrade has already made True Crime (in both docs and fiction), we immediately think of another film by another filmmaker: The Night of the 12th. Like Dominik Moll’s film, Sambre is an investigative series that is as economical as it is powerful in its way of seizing the “news” fact to talk, fundamentally, about a social phenomenon. Here, no excess, no blood or sensational effects. A victim (who symbolizes dozens), a rapist – who are at the heart of the first and last episodes respectively – and in the middle of the people who each changed the investigation and the perception we may have had of this story terrifying.

For more than thirty years, between France and Belgium, Dino Scala raped dozens of women (we are talking about fifty or sixty victims) on the edge of the departmental roads of the Val de Sambre. Arrested in 2018, his trial just ended a few weeks ago. The journalist Alice Géraud had drawn from this story a phenomenal book, sober and paralyzing, which retraced the affair focusing on the victims as much as on the faults of the police and society. It listed (and made their voices heard) dozens of women who had crossed paths with this serial rapist and above all asked the question: how could this guy have attacked so many women for thirty years, along the same road, without being worried? The book was damning for the police and judicial institutions, indifferent at best, and sometimes just cruel.

The series which begins this evening on FranceTV is a real success and frees itself from the book to give it another form of power and fascination. Jean-Xavier de Lestrade chose to give a dramatic turn to this tragedy, and while sticking as close as possible to the reality of the book, uses fiction (each protagonist is given a new name) to tell both the incredible impunity enjoyed by the rapist and the way in which the victims were anonymized for decades. Above all, where Géraud’s book functioned as a long, stretched litany, restoring an identity to the victims, the series is constructed in silos. Incredibly written (the dialogues are breathtakingly accurate) and remarkably performed (mixing young hopefuls and established actors), each episode therefore follows a point of view: a victim, a police officer, a magistrate, a city councilor, a scientist to end on the rapist’s journey. This succession of layers, of views, shows the different attempts to alert the population or find the criminal which accumulate, one after the other, without ever adding up and most often end up being abolished in dusty files. Faced with this, the violence of the criminal and the apathy of society remain unshakeable for a long time.

The first two episodes of Sambre are broadcast this Monday, November 13 on France 2. The complete season 1 is already available in full on the FranceTV website