If noir is about ambiguity, ambivalence, and personal anguish, Night Shift certainly qualifies. The film addresses global issues on a small scale, through the interactions of its four main characters. Asomidin Tohirov is a prisoner who is scheduled for deportation to his home country of Tajikistan. His background is never fully explained, but it appears that he is an illegal immigrant seeking asylum in France who has overstayed some predetermined time limit. Three police officers—Virginie, Erik, and Aristide—are given the task of taking Tohirov to the airport. Title cards identify each officer by first name only, and viewers are given brief glimpses into their personal and work lives.
(This article about Night Shift contains almost all the spoilers.)
Virginie starts her day with her husband and her eighteen-month-old baby boy. Before reporting for work, Virginie goes to an appointment to schedule an abortion. When she starts her workday, she is in the locker room changing into her uniform, and as she does so, her demeanor seems to shift: She is taking on her role of an officer. Virginie goes to a break room, where one of the officers there, Aristide, calls her Miss Norway. She continues through the room to a corridor. Another officer, Erik, asks her to accompany him: He is taking a battered woman back to her home to retrieve her belongings.
En route to the woman’s home, the woman starts crying in the backseat of the police car. Virginie tries to reassure her. At the battered woman’s home, the husband harasses Virginie, and Erik restrains him. The wife starts crying again and asks the officers to leave. Virginie writes her incident report back at the police station. Aristide interrupts her to ask her out to lunch at their usual kebab place, but she refuses.
The next police task is a public brawl between several civilians, which the police, including Virginie and Aristide, break up. After many of the civilians are arrested, restrained, and on their way to police vans, Virginie tells Aristide that she is pregnant with his child. In a flashback, viewers see how the two (Virginie and Aristide) first became attracted to one another during a night out with other police officers.
Back again at the police station, Hervé, one of the commanding officers, asks for volunteers to escort a prisoner to the airport for deportation. The so-called Escort Crew is unavailable because its members are fighting a prison fire. Erik agrees to go when asked. Virginie volunteers before being asked. Aristide joins at the last minute when he sees Virginie is going; he had originally refused the job.
When Erik’s day starts, viewers learn that he is married and does not have any children. His wife tells him that she would take things out on them, too, if they had had any. They argue; their marriage is troubled. Viewers see the police activity of the morning from Erik’s perspective, including the battered wife and the call for volunteers to escort the prisoner to the airport.
Viewers also see Erik’s interactions with Aristide because they are partners. They answer a call to help a woman and her child, but there is nothing that they can do because the child is dead. The woman claims that she never meant to hurt him and that she is not a bad mother.
Aristide’s day starts with a zoom call to his grandmother, who is hospitalized in his home country of Senegal. On his way to work, Aristide thinks of the night he and Virginie first were attracted to one another. His flashback continues with more details of that night out.
In this way, viewers learn about the events of the day from the perspective of each of the three police officers. Viewers learn about Tohirov and the police officers through their interactions and their conversations, and sometimes through flashbacks. Tohirov does not talk because he doesn’t understand or speak French. Everything viewers learn about him is through the three police officers: Virginie, Erik, and Aristide.
Virginie did not realize that their assignment involves taking a foreigner to the airport for deportation. She learns this from an offhand comment by Aristide as he drives the police transport van. She has another flashback showing the beginning of her affair with Aristide. They arrive at the prison to find it is the one on fire. As Virginie leads Tohirov out of the prison to the transport vehicle, a woman tries to stop them. She says that they appealed Tohirov’s case to the European Court for Human Rights, that the court is ruling soon, and that Tohirov will be killed on his return to his home country of Tajikistan.
Virginie knows nothing about the prisoner’s circumstances, but she sits in the backseat with him and has his sealed dossier on her lap. The seal on the dossier is minimal, so she opens it and reads it, and she is alarmed by what she reads. It seems the woman who tried to stop her was right. In addition, Tohirov suffered physical abuse and torture. Virginie reads the details to the others, and she becomes increasingly concerned about the task they have set out to do. When the prisoner starts crying, she takes off his handcuffs. Erik is infuriated by her attitude and her actions.
Virginie is the character who makes the argument that they should help the prisoner rather than simply follow the rules of proper police conduct. In a flashback during this sequence, Aristide and Virginie are in bed, and he talks of his grandmother, who raised him. Virginie’s flashbacks seem to be a way for her to reconcile what she knows about Aristide, what she found attractive about him, and his current attitude toward their prisoner. She seems to be the only one touched by the prisoner’s circumstances.
Aristide and Virginie stop to get a bite to eat and talk. Erik and Tohirov wait in the transport vehicle. While they are eating, Aristide begins to see Virginie’s point of view and understand her concerns. In the transport vehicle, Erik talks to Tohirov. He lays out the reasons why they should do their jobs, but Virginie and Aristide are not there to hear him, and Tohirov doesn’t understand. Erik doesn’t know why Tohirov is being sent back to Tajikistan, but he also doesn’t know what Tohirov is doing in France and his isn’t entirely convinced about his reasons for coming to the country in the first place. He acknowledges out loud that Tohirov could be a terrorist. Erik ends by saying, “I don’t understand. I understand nothing.” Aristide eventually comes around to Virginie’s way of thinking. Erik is still infuriated, but he finally accedes to their wishes and agrees not to stand in their way. He has given the reasons why they should follow police procedure, in contrast to Virginie.
They leave the prisoner, without handcuffs, alone in the transport vehicle in the woods, but he won’t leave the vehicle. Even when they push him out, Tohirov won’t leave. He probably doesn’t understand what they are trying to do, doesn’t understand what they want for him, and/or doesn’t know where to go. Erik says that Tohirov probably thinks they will try to kill him.
By now the tension is rising among the three police officers. They argue, and Aristide and Erik challenge one another. Virginie convinces everyone to get back into the vehicle, and they continue to the airport. No one is happy about the task, but they continue anyway. Erik is relieved to be getting it over with and staying out of trouble. He doesn’t want any marks on his service record because it is clean. They continue to the airport in silence and drop off the prisoner when they arrive.
After Tohirov is frisked by two new police officers, he is taken to the airport transport bus. Before the officers can load him in, he puts up a fight and starts screaming. Virginie, Erik, and Aristide watch Tohirov in still silence. As the three police officers start the drive out of the airport, Virginie starts to feel sick. Aristide asks her if she is alright, and she tells him she needs some air. In a few seconds, she sees, in her mind’s eye, Tohirov being dragged into the airport vehicle, and she starts running back to the terminal.
Aristide drives after her, then follows her on foot into the terminal and onto the plane. They talk first to the pilot, then tell the officers escorting Tohirov that he is a dangerous man. They demand to take the prisoner back. The escorting officers protest, but the pilot doesn’t want trouble in the air. He agrees to let the prisoner return to the ground.
During this scene, the camera focuses on Tohirov. He doesn’t understand at first. Everyone’s voices become muted to demonstrate his lack of understanding. But when Virginie makes eye contact with him, he understands finally that they are trying to help him.
On their way back to the station, Aristide thanks Erik for calming the customs officials down, but Erik is worried about the consequences of their actions. They all agree, including Erik, to include in their report that the prisoner was uncooperative, but Erik still fears the consequences. He has twenty years of service and not one blemish on his record—until now. Virginie, Erik, and Aristide have bought more time for Tohirov, but there is no guarantee that the European Court for Human Rights will make its decision in time to avoid another attempt to deport Tohirov. And I can’t help but think that calling him “dangerous” and “uncooperative” will hurt his chances.
The three officers continue with their respective days. Erik visits the seashore, where he looks happy for the first time in the film. Aristide goes to the clinic with Virginie. They walk out and down the street together, hand in hand. All three of them have no resolution to the day’s activities. They do not know what will become of Tohirov, who is presented as one of the most important decisions they faced that day. But they are peace with themselves, and that is a day that ends well.
Night Shift is called Police in France. It is based on a French novel, also called Police, by Hugo Boris. I cannot understand why the title was changed for English-language audiences. The three main characters, the police officers, are not really working a night shift; they have volunteered for an extra assignment, with overtime, that lasts until the assignment is finished. There is no time limit or shift work involved. I wish the distributors stuck with the original title: It would have made more sense.
But this is hardly a major complaint. The film takes its time explaining the stories of the officers and their prisoner. We know what the officers are facing at home and on the job, and we understand that the prisoner is really caught in an unfortunate situation created mostly by government red tape, at least as far as the film’s plot is concerned, and not by anything that he has done. Viewers are drawn into the story via the four main characters (the police officers and their prisoner), and they see the anguish, anger, and fear that each character experiences to varying degrees. Even though it takes place in France, the story could stand in for all the immigration stories taking place across the United States today, in 2025.
What I especially enjoyed about the film was its lack of a tidy ending. It resolves something about each of the four strands of the plot. Viewers learn that Tohirov is taken off the plane and returned to French custody, but we never learn if the European Court for Human Rights rules in time to have any effect on the man’s future. His impossible dilemma is resolved, but maybe only for a day or two, as Erik rightly points out. Still, it’s a relief to know that Virginie accomplished what she set out to do after she opened Tohirov’s file in the transport vehicle. Everything else is left to fate, which is one of the hallmarks of noir, old and new.
February 23, 2020 (Berlin), September 2, 2020 (France, Belgium), release dates • Directed by Anne Fontaine • Screenplay by Claire Barré • Based on the novel Police by Hugo Boris • Music by Guillaume Clément • Edited by Fabrice Rounaud • Cinematography by Yves Angelo
Omar Sy as Aristide • Virginie Efira as Virginie • Grégory Gadebois as Erik • Payman Maadi as Asomidin Tohirov • Aurore Broutin as the psychologist • Thierry Levaret as Hervé • Cécile Rebboah as the social worker • Anne-Pascale Clairembourg as Martine • Cédric Vieira as Virginie’s husband • Tadrina Hocking as the gynecologist • Elisa Lasowski as Sonia • Emmanuel Barrouyer as the abusive husband
Distributed by StudioCanal, Athena Film • Produced by F Comme Film, Ciné@, StudioCanal, France 2 Cinéma, France 3 Cinéma, Korokoro, Scope Pictures
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