Enregistrement de vidéosurveillance du supermarché

The supermarket surveillance recording is a pivotal investigative object: its unremarkable view of Louise shopping with Adam and Mila helps Nina Dorval question the reassuring picture of an irreproachable nanny, while leaving unresolved where Louise had been earlier that day. Replayed until it provokes nausea, the footage turns routine gestures and small lapses of attention into evidence that must be watched, interpreted, and tested against the timeline of the killings.

Discovery and Investigative Context

As Dorval reconstructs the sequence of events week by week, Louise remains in a coma and cannot explain what happened. The accounts she hears describe a nanny beyond reproach, but Dorval is determined to find the break in that account and understand what took place behind the closed doors of childhood. She questions Wafa, who says that she came to the apartment in the morning and found Louise unwilling to let her in. The children were in their pajamas, watching television; Wafa suggested taking them for a walk, but Louise refused, and Wafa left with Alphonse.

That account does not settle Louise’s movements. Rose Grinberg is certain that she encountered Louise in the building’s hall an hour before the nanny’s nap—and an hour before the murders. The police search the neighborhood, question local people, and visit the square, Café Le Paradis, and the passages of Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis. The supermarket recording offers a different kind of testimony: not a recollection, but images that can be replayed and scrutinized for what they show and what they do not.

What the Footage Shows

Dorval watches Louise move calmly through the aisles and pick up a pack of milk, a packet of biscuits, and a bottle of wine. The children range ahead without her following them with her eyes. Adam knocks packets down and bumps into the knees of a woman pushing a cart; Mila tries to reach chocolate eggs. Louise does not call the children or open her mouth to speak to them.

At the checkout, the children return to Louise laughing. They crowd between her legs, and Adam tugs at her skirt, but she ignores them. The recording registers only slight signs of irritation: a small tightening of her lip and a furtive glance from beneath her eyes. Those restrained gestures matter because the footage offers no spoken explanation of Louise’s state of mind. Dorval must infer from a face and a sequence of movements, while the children’s lively approach to Louise sits in contrast with her apparent refusal to respond.

Evidence, Interpretation, and Limits

The camera records a mundane shopping trip, not the murder or its cause. Its significance lies partly in its limits: it places Louise in the supermarket with the children, but does not account for the hour in which Rose says she saw her in the building’s hall, nor establish where Louise had gone before that encounter. The recording therefore sharpens the central investigative question without answering it.

Dorval watches the images again and again, until Louise’s quiet progress through the aisles makes her feel sick. In that repetition, ordinary details acquire a disturbing weight: the milk, biscuits, and wine; the children running out of her sight; Adam pulling at her skirt. Dorval reads Louise through the fairy-tale figure of a duplicitous mother who abandons children to the darkness of a forest. That comparison is the investigator’s interpretation, not something the recording proves. The footage becomes evidence precisely through this tension between visible conduct and the meaning Dorval assigns to it.