Eavesdropping on minor officials in the toilets, loitering with the jurors as they spar over lunch, but most especially drawn to Fabrice Luchini’s cold fish of a judge – there’s a soothing Altmanesque drift about this French drama orbiting a St Omer trial. The matter under consideration is grim – a man accused of kicking his seven-month-year-old daughter to death – but writer-director Christian Vincent has a gift for notching up comic detail in the margins: the flu-ridden judge being injected by his doctor in the buttock; his insistence on the proper courtroom terms of address. Luchini, in a deft performance, almost renders his character’s prissy demands and brushoffs heroic – the flourishes of a man busy conducting the ensemble of judicial impartiality. This brings Courted close to the socially conscious docudrama of Laurent Cantet’s The Class before Vincent blows the naturalism with an awkward plot thrust about Sidse Babett Knudsen’s juror, an old flame the judge is still in love with. Protruding melodramatically, it adds little to an otherwise briskly engaging study, leaving the jury hung on Courted.
