“No Judge, No Defendant” is a politically incorrect, evil, satirical, truthful movie. The creators of the popular Belgian series for many years filmed the work of the Brussels investigator Anne Gruvez – elegant, eccentric, cynical-witty woman, whose job is to get to the truth and sew it to the case.
The plot is based on a detective story about the investigation of the murders of prostitutes committed twenty years ago. DNA analysis, exhumations, interviews of survivors, under the curtain even planned to declare war on the United States to obtain biological samples. All this is decorated with corporate professional humor: “For me, Brussels is a census of corpses”; “A suicide was caught in the channel.” - Fresh? Very stale, all in shrimp; “You have to give me the data so I can break your life.”
But, in essence, the film is an uncompromising pamphlet in defense of European identity. Without exception, all the defendants passing through Anne's office before our eyes are migrants. And anyone who has walked at least once in the center of the capital of the European Union, understands that this is not a tendentious selection.
One sent aggressive messages to a friend ("Harassment"). Threats. Nothing special for an Albanian. The second robbed passers-by (“I calculated how much it would cost to keep you in prison, you’d better die right away”). The third took money from ATM users, and now complains that he lost his memory because of marijuana (“Tell the truth, my anger is worse than the wrath of Allah, mine is not after death, but immediately”). A fourth man on a motorcycle ripped off his bags and now threatens to go to Syria with jihadists if he is imprisoned. In a young woman with schizophrenia, her husband had already gone there, and she decided that her eight-year-old child was a demon, and killed him, because so she was told, appearing in a dream, the prophet Muhammad and Jesus (“What does Jesus have to do with this?”).
Anne, with her impeccable sweatshirts, for the filmmakers is Europe itself, as it should be. The message center of the tape is a tough dialogue with a young Turk who beat the mother of his child for not letting her read messages on her phone or telling whom she was dating. The perpetrator refers to a “special Turkish culture and mentality” that allows women to be tyrannized. He was born in Belgium and is Belgian. And what is this unheard of Belgian-Turkish culture? “Your references to ‘culture’ are just plain racism,” she hurls angrily at him.
The heroine bravely fights to prevent Europe from becoming a collection of eastern ghettos, but her fight seems almost hopeless. Anne is a passing nature, and those who will replace them may grow up in the ghetto and “understand” the mentality of criminals.
At first, “neither judge nor defendant” causes disbelief. Aren’t we talking about actors who have learned lines? But no – one of the defendants even sued the film, admitting that she agreed to be filmed, but objecting to commercial distribution – the episode was cut. The European press met the film coldly - its merits are recognized, but shift the emphasis: it allegedly reveals the dark side of the life of civil servants, their political incorrectness and prejudices. Anne Gruvez wants to make the defendant. So it hit a nerve.