Le septième juré (2008)

On [date unspecified], Grégoire Duval, a respectable small-town pharmacist, murders a young woman, Marianne Courtry, in a moment of madness. Since nobody saw him commit the crime, he keeps silent. Instead, Khader Boualam, one of the young woman’s many lovers, is accused of the murder. In a twist of fate, Grégoire Duval is appointed to the jury at Khader Boualam’s trial, and is thus charged with helping to judge the man, even though he himself committed the crime. Deeply troubled by the plight of the Algerian laborer, an ideal culprit in the eyes of the town’s respectable society, whose racism has been inflamed by the violence at the end of the Algerian War, Grégoire sets out on the path to redemption, thereby antagonizing his wife and his acquaintances. Making his mark in court, he exposes the lack of rigor in the criminal investigation and the weakness of the case against the accused, making the trial’s outcome uncertain. In trying to prove the accused innocent, he disrupts the social order—and, as is often the case, order matters more than truth. Before the trial, Grégoire Duval confesses his crime to his wife, Geneviève. Not particularly surprised, she urges him to keep quiet in order to protect their family, even if an innocent man has to pay in his place. This is not the pharmacist’s first crime: in similar circumstances, he had already murdered another young woman, Véronique Lebel, in [year unspecified], and buried her in his garden. His wife knows about this unpunished crime, because she had caught him dragging his victim’s body and helped him bury it. The verdict is delivered, and the Algerian laborer is sentenced to death. Grégoire then goes to confess to his friend, the gendarmerie captain in charge of the case. His friend, who has already deduced that Grégoire is guilty, tries to persuade him to stay silent and let young Khader be executed. Tormented by the thought that an innocent man might be condemned in his place, especially because of his foreign origins, Grégoire Duval kills himself. He writes a confession to both murders, then hangs himself in a barn—the very one where he strangled the second young woman. When his gendarme friend arrives, he gets the letter from a colleague and pockets it. After walking away, he reads it discreetly, then crumples it up and gets rid of it. For almost everyone, then, the reasons for Grégoire Duval’s suicide remain a mystery.