Jean-Pierre Salomé (2022)
This dramatisation of the real-life ordeals of the Irish trade unionist Maureen Kearney is absorbing, thanks to its star, and exasperating, thanks to the script and direction. Born in County Mayo in the mid-1950s, Kearney married a Frenchman and has lived in France since the mid-1980s. Early sequences in La syndicaliste – adapted by Jean-Pierre Salomé and Fadette Drouard from a 2019 book of the same name by investigative journalist Caroline Michel-Aguirre – illustrate Kearney’s work as senior union representative at Areva, a French nuclear power company. She chances upon information about a hush-hush deal between Electricité De France (EDF) and a Chinese power company. Realising this may result in a major transfer of nuclear technology from Areva to China and the loss of thousands of French jobs, Kearney turns whistleblower and soon finds herself on the receiving end of anonymous threats and harassment. (For example, a stone is chucked through the window of her car, while she’s sitting in it, by a smash-and-run assailant.) These scenes comprise an extended flashback from a prologue that has made clear where they are heading.
On 17th December 2012 – the day Kearney is due to meet with President François Hollande to discuss the EDF-China deal and its implications – a cleaner arrives at Kearney’s home to find her gagged and bound to a chair in the basement. The letter ‘A’ has been scratched with a knife onto her stomach, a knife handle inserted in her vagina with the blade protruding. Kearney tells the police she was overpowered, while at her bathroom mirror, by masked intruders (she thinks there were two), who then attacked and raped her. What happens in the months and years ahead is differently traumatising. An increasingly sceptical police investigation finds no forensic evidence to substantiate Kearney’s claims of intruders in her home or sexual assault. The police accuse her of staging the incident and self-harming. Under heavy pressure to do so, she withdraws her complaint but then changes her mind. In 2013 she’s charged with ‘dénonciation mensongère à une autorité judiciaire ou administrative entraînant des recherches inutiles’ – the French legal equivalent of ‘wasting police time’. In 2017 she’s convicted of the charge, resulting in a five-month suspended sentence and a €5,000 fine. The following year, she appeals successfully against the conviction and is cleared of charges of fabricating evidence. Text at the end of La syndicaliste notes there has been no subsequent investigation of Kearney’s allegations and that her initial fears for the future of the workforce she represented were thoroughly vindicated. Out of 50,000 Areva jobs, around seventy per cent have disappeared.
From the start, Jean-Pierre Salomé’s approach is to supply incidental detail – the exact dates on which events took place – but next to no context. It’s possible he neglects the latter because he thinks French viewers don’t need it although La syndicaliste is a French-German co-production that’s surely aiming for international audiences. (The film’s title seems to be proving a headache on its worldwide release. In some countries, it’s The Sitting Duck, which isn’t apt or appealing. ‘The Trade Unionist’, a literal translation, doesn’t get pulses racing either. Since both of those fail to convey that the title character is female, it’s not surprising La syndicaliste has been released in the UK and elsewhere under its original French name but this still feels like an admission of defeat.) At the start, Maureen Kearney (Isabelle Huppert) learns that Anne Lauvergeon (Marina Foïs) is to be removed as Areva CEO and replaced by Luc Oursel (Yvan Attal) – by order of the French President (still Nicolas Sarkozy at this point). It was only after seeing the film that I learned Areva was part-owned by the French state and that the hiring and firing of the company boss was a presidential matter. After Maureen backtracks on withdrawing her complaint, the narrative jumps forward to ‘Four years later’. That legend on the screen is followed, superfluously, by another, ‘May 2017’. Salomé gives no indication, however, of why it took so long for the wasting-police-time case to come to court, or what anyone in the story was doing in the intervening years.
The longer the film goes on, the longer the list of questions you want answering gets – and the more certain you become they won’t be answered. At the 2018 appeal hearing that is the film’s climax, Kearney’s advocate, Hervé Témime (Gilles Cohen), produces compelling evidence to refute the police case that she staged her own assault, including tying herself up. Shortly before the attack took place, she had injured her right shoulder in a fall at work (Salomé has shown this fall and Maureen’s subsequent treatment for it). Doctors’ reports now confirm that damage to her shoulder would have made it impossible for her to bind herself as the police contend. How come this medical evidence wasn’t produced until more than five years after she incurred the injury? It’s true that Kearney’s previous lawyer (François Perache) is presented as weak and, in relation to the police, compliant – but why, then, didn’t she and her husband, Gilles (Grégory Gadebois), get a different lawyer while Maureen was still up for the fight (before, that is, the police had broken her resistance, albeit temporarily)? When she’s told there’s no DNA evidence, Maureen’s incredulous but the matter seems not to be pursued – until Témime also discovers that test results mysteriously went missing on their journey back from the lab to the police.
Whenever his script asks a question, Salomé reliably cuts before a reply is forthcoming. For instance, Maureen is a fan of crime fiction – especially Ian Rankin novels. She underlines passages in them with marker pens, just as she highlights documents at work. The audience has probably wondered why, before Captain Brémont (Pierre Deladonchamps), leading police inquiries, does so. When Brémont broaches the matter with Maureen, implying that she’s storing up handy hints on how to fake a crime, Salomé and his editors (Valérie Deseine and Aïn Varet) promptly intervene. In retrospect, the unexplained Rankin detail seems nothing more than a tactic to make us wonder if Maureen might have invented the attack. It’s one of several such tactics. Maureen is shown to be an unreadably accomplished poker player. The means of assaulting and binding her – the knife and gaffer tape – were taken from her own kitchen. The family’s elderly Alsatian is a dog that didn’t bark when intruders entered the house. It emerges that Maureen made a previous allegation of rape when she was twenty and still living in Ireland.
These elements are designed to up the suspense in La syndicaliste – ditto Bruno Coulais’s conventional, overused score – but hardly serve their purpose since few viewers will believe a mainstream movie of the 2020s is going to reveal a protagonist like Maureen Kearney to be a liar. You don’t need to know what actually happened in this case in order to take that view: the protagonist’s gender is enough. A film such as André Téchiné’s The Girl on the Train (2009) – also inspired by real-life events, in which a young woman falsely claimed, with self-inflicted injuries to support the claim, that a gang had attacked her on an RER train – is unlikely to get made today. Besides, Salomé takes nearly every opportunity to present women and men in positions of power and/or responsibility in respectively positive and negative lights. Anne Lauvergeon is chic, self-possessed and ousted by a reputedly chauvinist president; her hectic male successor has serious anger management issues. Maureen does her job brilliantly; her right-hand man in Areva union work (François-Xavier Demaison) is pretty ineffectual. Brémont brusquely disregards Chambard (Aloïse Sauvage), the only female officer on his team, when she draws attention to an attack on a woman several years previously with striking similarities to the alleged attack on Kearney. Apart from game-changer Hervé Témime, the only exceptions to this tendentious scheme are the presiding judges at Maureen’s trial in 2017 (Andréa Bescond, smiley but deadly) and appeal hearing the following year (Sébastien Corona, neutral and reasonable).
The film’s atmosphere of generalised misogyny has the effect of blurring Maureen Kearney’s particular political significance but this doesn’t seem to matter much to Jean-Pierre Salomé. La syndicaliste features representations of real, powerful, living people and the crimes at the heart of the story remain unsolved. Although that may explain Salomé’s muffled approach to the material, a more imaginative film-maker would have found a way of expressing a clear point of view without getting into legal hot water. As it is, we never know whether the dishonest police investigation of Maureen’s claims is dictated by pressure from France’s political-economic establishment or sloppy, misogynist thinking on the part of the officers concerned. The earlier attack that involved the same MO as the attack on Maureen returns with renewed importance in the closing stages. The victim was the wife of a whistleblower. The female cop gives Maureen a copy of the police file on the case (without there being any suggestion that Captain Chambard, as she now is, must be risking her career in doing so). Maureen visits Véronique (Geno Lechner), the woman concerned, to hear her account of what happened; Véronique turns up outside the appeal court to cheer Maureen on; but I was none the wiser about the outcome of the police investigation in Véronique’s case. Characters like Anne Lauvergeon are dropped from the story without explanation. Arnaud Montebourg (Christophe Paou), Minister of Industrial Renewal in the Hollande administration in 2012 and 2013, appears still to be a minister in 2018, a year after the start of the Macron presidency (and four years after Montebourg actually left the Hollande government).
The narrative’s undoubted momentum is created and sustained almost single-handedly by Isabelle Huppert, whose performance is a triumph of acting authority over nonsensical casting. According to her Wikipedia profile, Maureen Kearney first became involved in French trade union activities after being hired by a subsidiary of what would later become Areva to teach English to technicians destined for work in Anglophone countries: ‘Outraged at having seen young engineers fired without compensation, she joined the CFDT [Confédération française démocratique du travail], becoming its “figurehead” at Areva’. After being cleared of criminal charges in 2018, Maureen doesn’t, in Salomé’s film anyway, resume her CFDT work but does return to teaching English as a foreign language. The classroom sequence near the end of La syndicaliste is more conspicuous, though, for showing Isabelle Huppert speaking English as a foreign language: even she can’t convince you it’s her native tongue. Although her miscasting is epitomised in this moment at the blackboard, it goes deeper and wider. Considering how many verbal insults are flung at Kearney in the course of La syndicaliste, it’s remarkable that none accuses her of being a trouble-maker who’s not even French. But how could they? Huppert’s screen presence is unarguably French: Maureen Kearney’s effortlessly classy outfits, designed by Marité Coutard, emphasise it all the more.
Yet Huppert compels attention superbly. Her acting motor – a precision instrument, which operates at speed – carries you along, despite the fuzzy screenplay. In the immediate aftermath to the terrifying attack, Maureen’s priority is to finish putting on her make-up: Huppert’s application of her red lipstick immediately suggests the heroine’s determination to hold her nerve and the effort of will required to do so. She’s an unbeatable choice to portray Maureen’s impatient intelligence and businesslike brio at work – as well as her poker face. She dramatises Maureen’s increasing vulnerability without recourse to conventional emotional breakdown. There’s some good work in supporting roles, even when these are written one-dimensionally (as they usually are). Pierre Deladonchamps and Christophe Paou, a famous partnership in Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake (2013), never share the screen in La syndicaliste but I liked both their characterisations. Without making him crudely malign or stupid, Deladonchamps manages to suggest that the police captain Brémont is somehow out of his depth. Paou’s complex plausibility ensures that Arnaud Montebourg is more than a standard-issue crooked politician. Maureen Kearney’s relationships with her daughter (Alexandra Maria Lara) and even her husband are underwritten. (Is he an orchestra musician – or conductor?) But Grégory Gadebois gives Gilles an agreeable humour. He brings about the few smiles the audience is likely to get out of Jean-Pierre Salomé’s grim story.
5 July 2023
