Guilty as charged

Complaint is a detective series of 52-minute episodes, centered around a police station in a working-class suburb of a provincial French city (the St. Herblain area of Nantes, to be exact), where detached houses with kitchen gardens rub shoulders with tower blocks. There's no mafia or organized crime, just petty lawbreaking, but it keeps our cops busy. Fights that get out of hand, conjugal disputes, quarrels between neighbors, family tiffs, pick-pocketing, pilfering from building sites, minor trafficking and illegal laborers. And plenty of bodily harm, from the trivial to the extremely grievous and, at times, even fatal. Against this backdrop of everyday lawlessness, the series paints a picture of people's lives when they slip out of control, veering into the comic, the tragic or the absurd.