In Docufiction mode, halfway between documentary and cinema, the series of Agnès Pizzini and Olivier Ayache-Vidal describes the mechanics of the 20th century judicial disaster that was this story of “landing incest” .
by Henri Seckel
The passing time does not led to amazement: more than twenty years after the triggering of the Outreau affair, one emerges frightened and nauseous of the documentary series in four chapters devoted to him France 2, overwhelmed by the Horrers suffered by children in the Renard Tour district (twelve have been recognized victims of rape and sexual assault), as by the test that the innocent adults challenged – some have spent more than Three years in prison for nothing.
The series of Agnes Pizzini and Olivier Ayache-Vidal describes the mechanics of the judicial disaster of the XXI e century. Or how “an incest of the level” – title of the first chapter -, denounced by the children of Myriam Badaoui and Thierry Delay, has transformed, through the instruction led by Fabrice Burgaud, into a large pedophile network involving ” notables “, then in French Dutroux affair.
Before the building built by this young judge locked in his office and his certainties, overwhelmed by the flow of revelations from which it had become impossible to disentangle the true from the false, collapsed during the Saint-Omer trials In 2004 and Paris in 2005: thirteen of the seventeen accused will be paid.
reconstructions of scenes
Four of them, Thierry Dausque, Daniel Legrand, Alain Marécaux and Dominique Wiel, tell the roller compressor judicial and media under which they have passed, while Jonathan Delay, one of the four children of the Badaoui-Delay couple , evokes his childhood in a home bathed in misery, alcohol and VHS porn, and his ambivalent status: victim of rape who broke his life, guilty – like many – of lies that broke Others.
The series is distinguished by its great formal originality, halfway between the documentary, with archive images and interviews facing the camera of various protagonists, and the cinema: certain crucial scenes of the case are played by actors , which reproduce the dialogues extracted from the judicial file.
These reconstructions, in an astonishing decor, take the spectator in the Badaoui-Delay fair, in the police station of Boulogne-sur-Mer where the children told how adults “made them”, or in the Office of Fabrice Burgaud, where the fabrications of Myriam Badaoui and the errors of the judge maintained the hellish gear.
It misses this successful series the word of those we would like to hear the most, with twenty years of hindsight: that of judge Burgaud himself, that of the prosecutor of Boulogne-sur-Mer, Gérard Lesigne-we Hears them all the same during their visit to the parliamentary committee of inquiry set up in the wake of the case -, and those of the four convicted: Myriam Badaoui, Thierry Delay, Aurélie Grenon and David Delplanque. Some did not wish to participate, the others are not found.
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In addition, what the series gains in evocative flesh and power thanks to its narrative process, it loses it in fine understanding From the file: television cannot exhaustively approach a story as dense as that of Outreau, even in four fifty -minute episodes. To complete the series and apprehend the case in all its complexity, it may be useful to read Outreau, the story of a disaster (Max Milo, 2022), in which lawyer Gilles Antonowicz explores each corner to deliver a clinical analysis.