CANAL+ – WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 16 – 9 PM – FILM
After two films based in his native Corsica, The Apaches (2013) and A violent life (2017), Thierry de Peretti continues on the path of a political-fiction that allows him to touch the unrepresentable of power by caressing its mythologies, this dark side that Balzac called “the other side of contemporary history”.
State Scandal Investigation opens with a well-known formula, according to which situation and characters are fictitious, and any resemblance to reality purely coincidental. Oratorical precaution which, recalling the right to the imagination, designates in hollow the highly inflammable material which it handles. The story is inspired by the case of François Thierry, former cacique of the fight against drugs suspected of having been involved in trafficking, through the book The Infiltrator (Robert Laffont, 2017), reported by journalist Emmanuel Fansten and witness Hubert Avoine.
Since it is a question of mythologies, it is first of all those of a certain genre cinema, namely the paranoid thriller, that Peretti has in his sights. In October 2015, Jacques Billard (Vincent Lindon), head of the Central Office for the Suppression of Illicit Drug Trafficking, gives a speech to his peers and sheds light on his policy: no longer focusing on the product and letting it pass to borders, preferably hitting the traffic infrastructure. But, at the same time, customs seized 7 tons of resin in two vans parked under the windows of a cannabis baron in the middle of 8e district of Paris, upscale district.
State traffic
Billard finds himself in the hot seat, summoned to explain himself to the public prosecutor (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi). It is then that Hubert Antoine (Roschdy Zem), an obscure character who claims to have been an infiltrator under Billard’s orders, starts talking to Stéphane Vilner (Pio Marmaï), a journalist at Release, heavily loading his former boss, according to him, at the head of state traffic. The diary follows, but Antoine’s words go far and suspicions arise as to his supposed mythomania. Is Vilner not being taken for a walk, even instrumentalized?
Started under the auspices of the paranoid thriller, the film allows the genre to be diluted in something else, more everyday: a profuse naturalism, made up of Sunday meals, drunken evenings, holidays at the edge of the water, where no longer count than conversations on a human scale. A way of substituting a horizon of artificial efficiency for this profuse fabric of small human affairs, where “Business” with a capital A fades away.
You have 12.55% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.