La Syn­di­cal­iste

You’d be for­giv­en for think­ing you’ve seen La Syn­di­cal­iste before. It is a murky-grey dra­ma shot with cor­po­rate restraint, the sort of thriller vérité that gets a scat­tered UK release because Cather­ine Deneuve, Juli­ette Binoche or Isabelle Hup­pert is in it. In this case it’s the lat­ter, with hair dyed blonde like the for­mer, deliv­er­ing her trade­mark turn as an enig­mat­ic but fierce woman who can deliv­er mono­logues with a slight raise of her right eye­brow. Assured of her pres­ence, every­one else seems to have tak­en the day off.

It is pecu­liar to think of Hup­pert as The Sit­ting Duck, to give the film its Eng­lish title. So pow­er­ful is her self-com­mand that it is hard to find a sense of vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty in her gaze or pos­ture – some­thing which the film needs us to believe. The film unites Hup­pert with direc­tor Jean-Paul Salomé fol­low­ing 2020’s Mama Weed, which saw her get down and dirty in the world of drugs. This time she is Mau­reen Kear­ney, La Syn­di­cal­iste, or ​‘The Trade Union­ist’ for the nuclear pow­er com­pa­ny Are­va. Yet the film­mak­ers do away with Kearney’s Irish her­itage, opt­ing instead to have their star appear once again as her for­mi­da­ble French self.

After Kear­ney dis­cov­ers that the state-owned util­i­ty Elec­tric­ité de France is mak­ing a secret deal with a Chi­nese pow­er com­pa­ny, she fears that a trans­fer­ral of sen­si­tive nuclear tech­nol­o­gy to Chi­na will threat­en the jobs of thou­sands of French work­ers. Her whistle­blow­ing infu­ri­ates the pow­ers that be, with a series of anony­mous threats pil­ing up around her until she is bru­tal­ly attacked and raped in her home. There is no fluc­tu­a­tion in style in the film, how­ev­er, with each sequence staged and filmed in the same monot­o­nous man­ner which makes it impos­si­ble to emo­tion­al­ly engage with the har­row­ing events it depicts.

The first half is a mind-numb­ing slog of indus­tri­al­ist jar­gon which plays out as a ver­ba­tim trans­la­tion of the 2019 book ​‘La Syn­di­cal­iste’ by inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ist Car­o­line Michel-Aguirre. The sec­ond is con­sid­er­ably more engag­ing, effec­tive­ly a court­room dra­ma in which Kearney’s tes­ti­mo­ny as a sur­vivor is severe­ly ques­tioned. Here the film flirts with themes of chau­vin­ism and polit­i­cal cor­rup­tion, espe­cial­ly in the oppor­tunis­tic posi­tion­ing of Kear­ney as a com­pul­sive liar. Yet it nev­er comes close to the inci­sive inter­rog­a­tive pow­er of a film like Alice Diop’s Saint Omer, for example.

Salomé is not an imag­i­na­tive direc­tor, appar­ent­ly con­tent to sit back and watch Hup­pert com­mand the film with lit­tle regard for the rest of his cast and crew. He has her heav­i­ly made-up, her skin smoothed to an almost com­i­cal degree. The film is sim­i­lar­ly slick, lack­ing any sense of raw real­ism that a work so tech­ni­cal on a script-lev­el requires to sus­tain the atten­tion of an unfa­mil­iar view­er. It is the antithe­sis of Paul Verhoeven’s sim­i­lar­ly-plot­ted Elle, with a sim­i­lar­ly vio­lent premise, and has one long­ing for Hup­pert to pick up an axe and wreak hav­oc once again.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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