France
2011/35mm/115mins — AUSTRALIAN PREMIERE
FRIDAY 28 OCTOBER 4.00 PM – BUY!
MONDAY 31 OCTOBER 8.15 PM – BUY!
A towering central performance underpins this thrilling portrayal of a newly appointed Cabinet Minister navigating the complexities of office.
Within moments of taking office, Minister of Transport Bertrand Saint-Jean is thrown into the deep end when a coach crashes in a snowy mountain pass. But this is only the start of the Minister’s problems – as he has to deal with unions, privatisation, backstabbing colleagues, an unsympathetic bureaucracy and the everhungry media. Director Pierre Scholler creates a gripping and detailed study of life at the top, with Oliver Gourmet giving an outstanding and complex performance as a good man constantly at war with the need to compromise.
Screenings at Cannes and Paris Film festivals
FIPRESCI (Film Critics) Prize – Cannes Film Festival
“a rare project that sees past the clichés of politics” Peter Debruge, Variety
“captures the way a minister’s life is unrelenting, addictive and his or her shelf life is almost certainly short.” Allan Hunter, Screen Daily
L’EXERCISE DE L’ETAT
Writer/Director Pierre Scholler Producer Denis Freyd
Cast Oliver Gourmet, Michel Blanc, Zabou Breitman Print Source Doc & Film International
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This film is a whirlwind of turmoil and activity. We are dropped into this whirlwind of drama and commotion, buffeted from one scene to the next, and chucked out at the end. There is so much going on that no doubt a second viewing would reveal subtleties I missed first time through. It scores a 3 from me.
There’s a lot to take in. I suspect French speakers would get a lot more from this film. I was surprised by the ending, is so much that it ended when it did. I was beginning to get to know the characters and interested to see where the adventure would take me next, when bang, it ended.
The film immerses you into a hive of activity including, drama, intrigue, hatreds, uncertainty, backstabbing, lies, sex, and fantasy (the minister’s fantasy that is). The pace seldom slows and I felt tense keeping up with the subtitles. It was a too fast for me. There were times I preferred to look at the visuals and missed the dialogue. And conversely I sometimes spent too much time reading the dialogue and probably missed the nonverbal communication. I wasn’t game to try to follow all the names of people who came and went.
This film may be memorable for its opening and certainly the accident took me by surprise.