La sentinelle (1992)

At an unspecified time, Mathias Barillet decides to leave the Federal Republic of Germany, where he was born and raised because his late father was a military attaché in Aachen, and come to France to complete his medical studies. On the train, after being taken away by force on the pretext that his visas are incorrect, he is confronted by Louis Bleicher, a man engaged in murky activities somewhere between police methods and intelligence-service tactics. Bleicher isolates and threatens him. The next day, Mathias finds a mummified human head in his suitcase. He struggles to get his qualifications recognized, but manages to enroll in forensic medicine so he can continue his residency semesters at the Paris Medico-Legal Institute. He shares a large apartment at 25 rue Réaumur with William Mahé, a young official at the Quai d’Orsay, and reconnects with his sister, an opera singer with whom he has a complicated relationship. Obsessed with the head, which he cannot bring himself to part with and about which he knows nothing, he secretly decides to use the resources at his disposal to identify the person and determine the cause of death, in order to “save the dead man.” He suspects that whoever placed it in his luggage had the same goal. Without realizing it, he soon runs up against state secrets concerning the fate of French people held on the other side of the Iron Curtain since the end of the war, as well as the subtle games of espionage and counterespionage between East and West, in which Louis Bleicher—who has been missing for three months—was a link. With determination and rigor, Mathias succeeds in identifying the head: it belongs to a 36-year-old Russian chemist whom the Varins network had brought over to the West and who was executed in Sumatra under murky circumstances. These discoveries endanger the activities of the Quai d’Orsay cell, which decides to put intense pressure on Mathias to make him hand over the head. In this struggle, William and his friend lose their lives. Clinging to one last fragment of the dead man’s jaw, Mathias manages, not without causing a scene, to return it, naming the dead man to a Russian diplomat.