jury duty (imdb) doesn't bother with introductions. in the very first scene, grégoire duval, a pharmacist in small town france, tries to force himself on a young woman. she starts to scream and he strangles her to death. it's 1961, in the midst of the algerian war of independence. the victim's algerian boyfriend is accused of the murder and is widely assumed to be guilty in the racially-charged atmosphere. duval is chosen for the jury and has to decide whether he is willing to sentence an innocent man to death to cover for his own crime.
the film is intended to be about the racial politics of early 1960s france, but it is unintentionally said about sexual politics both then and now. there are basically only two female characters in the movie, the victim, who we know little about other than the fact that she slept around a lot, and duval's wife, who spends the entire film plotting to advance her position in society, even if it means covering for her husband's crimes. and there we have it, the classic bitch/slut dichotomy. on one level the film is about duval's attempts to make up for his own guilt by saving the innocent algerian. on another, the film pours all its sympathy on male characters (even the would-be rapist/murderer protagonist) and treats the female characters rather badly. it's really striking how much effort the film makes to build (well deserved) sympathy for the accused algerian, but pays no such attention to the murdered woman.
in writing this post, i discovered that the film is actually a remake of a 1962 film. so maybe the film's sexism can be explained as the a product of that earlier time. and yet, from what i can tell from the imdb entry, in the earlier film the accused was not algerian. it seems the original plot focused more on class differences than race. presumably, race was added to the modern version to explore an issue that was unexplorable when the original was made. but if that's true, couldn't they also have done a better job dealing with the sexism of the story?
one more thing, i don't understand why they gave the film the english name "jury duty." a lot of times the original names of foreign films don't sound right if translated word-for-word into english. so it makes sense that the filmmakers would want to give a film a catchier english title when it travels the the english-speaking world. if nothing else, it's a good marketing decision. but this film's original title is "le septième juré", which would translate as "the seventh juror". "the seventh juror" is a much better title for this film than "jury duty". "jury duty" sounds like the title of a comedy or buddy cop movie, not something that takes itself as seriously as this.
