Isabelle Huppert stars as the head union representative of a multinational nuclear power company in Jean-Paul Salomé’s corporate drama.
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.
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Published 29 Jun 2023
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