Le Petit Lieutenant

Questions (comprehension, culture, vocabulary)

1. At the beginning of the movie, what type of procedure or event takes place after the graduation ceremony?

2. Which character is le petit lieutenant?

3. What does the lieutenant's wife do for a living?

4. Where does the lieutenant's wife live?

5. What is the main focus of the lieutenant's job?

6. Which other branches or units are introduced in the film?

7. When some of the colleagues are having dinner at one of their homes, why does the lieutenant ask him about specific difficulties when that particular colleague began working in the field?

8. Does the lieutenant use any vocabulary that might be particular to his line of work? What about his colleagues?

9. Why does the lieutenant have to go on a road trip with his team supervisor? Where do they go?

10. You can learn more about the national police in France by performing a search for the official French government site and then navigating within the site. The recruiting division also has a blog that you might find interesting. http://www.blog-police-recrutement.com/ .

11. In the first transcribed scene, the landlady/owner of the boarding house talks about the good ol' days--when things were different, of course. Why does she make a reference to Inspector Maigret, a character created by author Georges Simenon? (A similar question can be found in the lesson materials for Les Rivières pourpres.)

12. Antoine's supervisor mentions a "un gros . . . genre Guy Georges" in the third transcribed scene. The use of genre (without a determiner such as le or un) is similar to like or for example in informal conversation. The use of gros here doesn't mean fat. What does it mean (given that they're talking about catching criminals)? What would be a good English translation of this adjective? You will also notice that a few lines below, the supervisor uses gros gros to put emphasis on the adjective. If you're interested in understanding this cultural reference, you can do a search with the keywords "Guy Georges" in parentheses, and you'll probably find at least a few articles about him.

13. Why is Line 19 in the third transcribed scene particularly funny? There are two reasons: 1) The passer-by asks the detectives for a drag of what they are smoking--which may or may not be exactly legal; and 2) The passer-by warns them that it's "blindé de keufs" in that particular neighborhood. The terms "blindé" and "keufs" are very informal terms that you could think of as colloquial or slang. Try to find these words and find other words that are less informal/slang.