THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED
The latest feature film by Thierry de Peretti opens with a well-known formula according to which the 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.
After two films based in his native Corsica, The Apaches (2013) and A violent life (2017), 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”. One of the key characters ofState Scandal Investigation reveals at one point his project: nothing less than “to destroy the Republic”.
Since it is a question of mythologies, it is first of all those of a certain genre cinema, namely the paranoid thriller, that the film has in its sights. In October 2015, Jacques Billard (Vincent Lindon), head of the Central Office for the Suppression of Illicit Drug Trafficking (OCRTIS), gives a speech to his peers and sheds light on his policy: no longer focusing on the product and the pass at borders, preferably hitting the traffic infrastructure. But at the same time, customs seized seven tons of resin in two vans parked in the middle of 8and arrondissement of Paris, an upscale district, under the windows of a cannabis baron.
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 burdening his former boss, according to him at the head of state traffic. The revelations are going well, the newspaper 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?
Even more than on trafficking or corruption in high places, the film focuses on the relationship between the journalist and the informant, an ambiguous character with unverifiable statements, of whom we will never know if he is telling the truth or if he is making it up. Between one and the other, there are two paranoid needs that find themselves, come together and feed each other: the need to tell stories on the one hand, to believe on the other, which seal a friendship in a vacuum, a symbiosis which is unaware of itself, is tested by blows of headlines and ends in the publication of a book.
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