La question humaine
Nicolas Klotz (2007)
Simon Kessler (Mathieu Amalric) is a human resources psychologist in an international petrochemical company. (He works in Paris but the company seems to have German senior management.) Simon has made his professional name through the extremely rigorous team-building exercises he carries out for the company, designed to test the commitment and emotional endurance of its employees. One day, the number two in the company asks Simon to investigate its CEO, whose behaviour is becoming increasingly eccentric. Heartbeat Detector is based on a 2000 novel by François Emmanuel called La question humaine (retained as the film’s French title). The screen adaptation by Elisabeth Perceval shows little imagination: there are many scenes consisting of first person narrative voiceover or when a character passes on a load of information to the protagonist, who (like the audience) has to sit and listen and try to react. These sound like chunks of monologue lifted from the book and dropped leadenly into the screenplay without any thought for how they will (or won’t) play.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly showed Mathieu Amalric to be a very gifted actor but you wouldn’t guess it from this. It’s one of those performances where the actor’s awareness that he’s working with weighty themes robs him of any natural expressiveness. Amalric seems frozen: we can see that Simon has a lot on his mind but not much more than that. And he gets no help from the director. It doesn’t seem an original insight to see a fascistic element in corporate culture but the artificial connections made between Nazi atrocities and the humiliations meted out to the participants in Simon’s seminars are an offensive mismatch. And classical music as a key to open a Nazi secret past seems a tired idea. There’s an accumulation of gruellingly boring sequences that go on so long you almost want to shout out, begging them to stop. Neither the story nor the characters develop any depth or complexity. The effect is eventually nightmarish: you start wondering if the film is ever going to end – there seems no reason why it should.
Heartbeat Detector is also one of those films so smitten with the darkness of what it’s going to reveal that there’s a miserable, sinister pall over virtually all its scenes. If, at the outset, life at the company were presented in a way that described its phony bonhomous energy – to be stripped away like the characters’ forms of protection – that would at least give some tonal variety to the narrative. But the film is shot in cold, glum, soulless colours from the word go. (A brief exterior shot in sunlight, about twenty minutes from the end, is almost startling.) The only pleasure and interest in the film is provided by Michael Lonsdale’s performance as the suffering CEO. It was in 1973 that Lonsdale played, memorably, the detective on the trail of ‘the Jackal’ in Fred Zinnemann’s adaptation of the Frederick Forsyth bestseller. As well as being thirty-five years older, Lonsdale is at least thirty-five pounds heavier now. In Heartbeat Detector, he uses that bulk uncannily – to suggest an intransigent accretion of pain and guilt – and in a way that makes the expressive delicacy of his hand movements all the more poignant. It’s dismaying to think (but hard to avoid thinking) that the plumes of smoke rising bleakly from the chimneys of the petrochemical plant are meant to evoke the chimneys of concentration camps. It’s one thing to make films about the afterlife of Nazi war criminals who become respectable, successful members of postwar society: but the guilt-ridden lives depicted here are those of the children of Nazis. This is a second order guilty secret. On how many generations are the sins of the fathers going to be visited as a convenient way of jacking up a dark-side-of-the-human-soul melodrama?
13 July 2008
