Lil Quinquin

It had been a mini-series on French TV which is why it's three and a half hours long.

A murder mystery of sorts. It made me think of an old episode of Picket Fences where the cops raid a farm and find that cows are being impregnated with human fetuses. This is at the other end of the life cycle. Dismembered murder victims are being crammed into the bodies of dead cows.

Lil Quinquin himself is a racist kid about twelve who runs around with his racist friends. They abuse and attack a couple of Muslim kids, they mock and harass a girl who sang in a talent show. He lives in a farm with his parents, grandparents and developmentally disabled uncle while the sheriff and his assistant drive around in a small Citroen investigating the crime in their way.

Set in Norther France across the channel from England.

I didn't know what to say about it so I looked at comments on imdb.com. I was surprised that people hated it. I rather enjoyed it.

Quinquin was played by an odd-looking little fellow with a crooked mouth. His nose looked like it had been smashed against his face. He was cute in his way. He had a little girlfriend. 

The actor, Alane Delhaye, has only one other screen credit, another miniseries where he plays the same character as a grown-up, apparently now a fascist attending meetings of the Nationalist party.

In a way, after the hours and hours of MSNBC I've had to sit through, it would probably be refreshing to have, say, a Trump supporter in a movie and to have that presented it as neutral information, without explicitly condemning or supporting or explaining it in any way. I took this movie to be anti-racist. At one point, the racist kids feel some sympathy for the Black kid they've been persecuting, but they don't have a total change of heart, and in the sequel they've apparently become full-blown fascists. 

The kids are such little bastards anyway, it would be out of character to have them be anything else.

I've said before that every French movie makes France look like a hellhole. This one makes it LOOK kind of nice. They have a lovely town, quaint farms. The police have their quirks but aren't monsters. But the casual yet violent racism ruined it.

Available on the Criterion Channel.