This vivid movie is deeply touching. We taste all the range of emotions : disgust, anguish, laughter ("Eh... I lost my phone !").All the actors are perfect, Joey Starr and Marina Foïs ahead. The children are outstanding as well.We're seeing the day-to-day life of the entire squad, their personality and bond are all different and very interesting. In my opinion there aren't supporting roles. Each one contribute to the richness of the movie. All the case depicted, theses lives, are overwhelming. From the little girl whose father "loves her too much" to the molested delivering girl, not to mention heart-breaking Ousmane. And yet it's the everyday life of a juvenile division. I couldn't bear it. My favorite movie of 2011 for the feelings it brought me.

The film starts out as an interesting pseudo-documentary about the French Child Protection Services, and it seems sort of like The Office. Unfortunately the film then drags on for another 90 minutes as it jumps from vignette to vignette (abused child, abandoned child, etc) while you get to see a massively dysfunctional arm of the police department yell and function incoherently. If I was their boss, I would've fired about half of the people in that office long before movie ended.The drama is hugely overblown in the film, but unfortunately it is not funny in any scene, even when the director tries to make it so, as when the -entire department- starts making fun of a girl who was sexually abused after her cell phone was stolen. Other ridiculous scenes (although there are so many): • Fred taking off the glasses of the (unnamed?) weirdo photographer, then letting her hair down? It's like out of some 1980s teen comedy, but done here to supremely awkward effects.• The CPS people abusing a girl who just gave a stillborn (or possibly aborted) baby a few months after being raped.• So, so, so many unexplained character interactions, e.g. between the weirdo photographer and her baby daddy. Why is he taking care of their children? Why does he seem like a child molester himself, but then this plot is never, ever developed at all? Why is she hiding from his gaze when she leaves her apartment, across the street? None of this is even remotely explained. The photographer's romance with the guy on the squad is incredibly overdone and unnecessary.• Why did they think it was a good idea to bring along someone with horrible anxiety issues to an undercover gem smuggling operation? No one was like "this girl who freaks out by saying 'hello' should probably not be playing a central role in the operation"?There are many more. I don't seem to be nitpicky, I can enjoy movies with some plot holes, but this film is an entire series of partially explained character interactions. It's the film equivalent of Lost. Stop introducing character development if you're not going anywhere with it, good lord. I get that nothing is really 'resolved' when you're working with Child Protection Services, but even that point is not gotten across very well.I've seen worse films, but would definitely not recommend this to anyone. I did not previously know that Luc Besson was a pedophile and molested this film's director when she was a girl, but it's also unfortunate that she didn't make a better story about child abuse, given her own history. C'est la vie.

The average time that someone can work in child protection is two years. Some last longer, or there would not be supervisors, but it is a rough business, as this film depicts.What should grab you is that they move from case to case without any continuity. This is the real world of child protection. You deal with a druggie mother today, a pederast grandfather tomorrow, and neglected or abused children the next day. Some may find the language off-putting, but that is the way it is. You are under such stress during work, that you have to relieve it somehow after you get off. It may be crude, but it is effective.I can also relate to those who lose it occasionally. You can put your heart and soul into this job, and get frustrated easily by parents and the bureaucracy.The film may have been actors, but it has a documentary feel as they portray the action as it really happens.

This could have a been a very good drama based on a very serious subject. There are some interesting and powerful moments but overall the bad acting and poor script made me wonder what the hell I was watching and how the hell could I have been made to believe this film was worth it. When I looked it up post-hoc and found who the director was it all started to make sense. Maïwen, a mildly annoying character running around with her 10-euro camera taking pictures of everything and pretending to be a professional photographer is also the director of this film! Maïwenn - here's a piece of advice for you: a jack-of-all trades is a master of none. You should have stuck to your wonderful acting career and leave this theme alone! This film should be shown in art schools as an example of how NOT to make films.