A dog runs quickly, fleeing the bowl they want him to sell in the next shot. Change channels. A monster in a self-propelling cape has a hard time flying, the demands of fiction call him and he has to tear himself away from the animation techniques that make him hyperventilate. Change channels. A very cool-looking (revolting) American woman looks like she’ll make a decision. Change channels again. A cop who must have taken her at face value, as is audible in the off-screen explosions. Change as many times as you wish, flip channels at any time of day, especially when there is nothing to see: You will always find at least one cop on patrol on TV occupying a channel and reminding you that the primary role of stories is to recount the Law.

Police (Maurice Pialat, 1985) stands out in light of this permanent iconography that constitutes a kind of other frame, teeming and shapeless. However, nothing in the film summons these automatic images because its figurative economy places it outside the established rules. Police refrains from questions about what distinguishes good and evil, police and thieves: The rigged dialectic that galvanizes many admirable films is reduced to its moral insignificance by Mangin (Gérard Depardieu) distractedly recalling that “They always say cops and crooks are the same” and symmetrically, to the amusement of the dealer to whom he later brings drugs and money, “Well, here's the world upside down.” The film is also uninterested in reconstructing a potential documentary truth about ordinary police activities, which might contradict the ambient iconography: Hollywood cinema—from Sam Fuller to Don Siegel—cannot be underestimated in this regard since it excels at taking charge of the mediocrity, sadness, cruelty and absurdity of gestures of order.

Before good and evil, Police deals with identity, which gives back strength and interest to the representation of police officers and the judiciary. Not by defining and assigning but by scrambling, confusing and agitating the Same and the Other in a disordered manner and without placing the confusion on the side of good. The question of identity is posed anew in every scene without ever being settled, not only because no response resolves or even lightens it, but because the economy that brings it to light becomes continually more complex, displacing and undoing itself.