The political fight succeeds for Isabelle Huppert.
After
Les Promesses
, in which the actress played a suburban mayor torn between her personal ambition and her mandate as a local elected official, she slips into the suit of a CFDT delegate at Areva in La
Syndicalist
.
Not just any.
Maureen Kearney, whose name is attached to a politico-industrial scandal, strangely passed under the radar.
Jean-Paul Salomé's film is inspired by the investigative book by Caroline Michel-Aguirre (Stock).
It begins in the middle, when Maureen Kearney is found in the cellar of her house tied to a chair, the letter A scarified on her stomach, a knife inserted through the handle into her vagina.
Before this sordid attack by hooded men, she was a flirtatious and pugnacious trade unionist, defending tooth and nail the jobs of the flagship of the French nuclear industry.
A mole at EDF informs him of a future agreement between Areva, EDF and a Chinese consortium.
She fears a technology transfer to China and a massive layoff plan in France.
The whistleblower disturbs, tries to sensitize politicians.
She continues to see Anne Lauvergeon, leader of Areva landed and replaced by Luc Oursel, angry and incompetent.
He calls her a pain in the ass.
She feels followed, watched.
Read alsoIsabelle Huppert: “We all have something to hide, actress or not”
Salomé skillfully orchestrates a paranoid climate tinged with sexism.
Until the rape, the tipping point of the film.
No trace of DNA of the hooded attackers was found.
The police take her for a mythomaniac.
The investigators put pressure on him during the interrogations.
She underwent several humiliating gynecological examinations.
We want to know why she went six hours with that knife handle without kicking her out.
She is accused of false denunciation.
She ends up making a confession, retracts, appeals against her conviction.
Use of genre film
Like
La Nuit du 12
, the thriller by Dominik Moll on a PJ investigation into a feminicide,
La Syndicalist
uses genre film (here, the political thriller) to tell a world governed by men (bosses, politicians, police).
The social milieu depicted is different, but the high spheres are not immune to misogyny.
Here again, the expression “toxic masculinity” is not used.
Yet it oozes with every sequence where Maureen Kearney confronts these men of power.
Salome does not invent anything.
But he depicts with great finesse the fight of a woman to regain her dignity and her honor.
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