FILM OF THE WEEK: The Conquest
by Vadim Rizov 
Before
The Conquest's May premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, a trailer promised a scathing rendition of French president Nicolas Sarkozy's rise, highlighting actor
Denis Podalyd�s' impersonation while spitting out the lines "I am a Ferrari. You open up the hood with gloves on." Sarkozy's actress wife, Carla Bruni, had a small part in the fest's opening night film,
Midnight In Paris;
said to be worried about
The Conquest, she skipped the red carpet. At that point, Sarkozy's domestic approval rating had hit a new low of 21%. This week, in time for
The Conquest's U.S. release, it's hanging at around
30%, and?a convenient irony?Sarkozy just finished another stint in Cannes last week, this week for a G20 conference that was overshadowed by Greece's near-default and ended with the embattled president literally getting
rained on.
The Conquest isn't so much satire as a potentially bewildering 105-minute
interpretation of Sarkozy's path from Minister of the Interior in 2002 to his 2007 ascent to the presidency. In Podalyd�s' rendition, Sarkozy?s a swarthy Andy Serkis-type often referred to as "the midget," who walks like
Mr. Bean (an undignified comparison German Prime Minister Angela Merkel's
made (the physical impersonation, as with everyone cast, is uncanny), scarfs chocolates like crazy and?America-lover that he is?scarfs a sub-elementary-school-cafeteria burger behind his desk. His recurring lack of dignity is the one joke
The Conquest has to offer: rather than real satire, director Xavier Durringer offers up a disconnected series of power plays, strategy sessions and barely civil dinner-table negotiations from inside a political bubble, expecting homeland viewers (not unreasonably) to provide context.
The most potent example:
when riots broke out in 2005 in the
banlieues (read: ?suburbs?/projects) and continued for 20 nights, Sarkozy declared an intolerance for ?scum? and broke out the fire hoses. Condemnations from the left ensued (you can read a particularly indignant one from
La Haine director
Mathieu Kassovitz here), and Sarkozy was accused of throwing quite literal fuel on the fire, stoking discontent over the death of young Muslim men on the alleged run from police into real public violence. You only get trace images of those events here: Sarkozy riding past cars on fire with the sheerest indifference, cackling over the hit his statements made with the press on a plane ("What I said last night has tongues wagging") and receiving a brief tongue-lashing from then-President Jacques Chirac (
Bernard Le Coq) for his potentially irresponsible act. Durringer doesn't even bother to include Sarkozy's statements in full: for a French audience well-schooled in the recent events, it'd be overkill, a reenactment of a recent TV memory.
The Conquest is, more or less, a condemnation, with the title framing Sarkozy?s rise in martial terms. Unlike
Oliver Stone's wishy-washy
W.?its nearest point of reference?it rejects empathy, showing Sarkozy in shark-like motion from one cynically calculated decision to the next. In
W., Stone had President Bush trip over a corn-cob during a picnic early in his career, presumably a metaphor for how a well-meaning-but-dim populist stumbled over trashy, cornpone sentimentality and mistook it for solid policy. Here, the most important (and sole humanizing) factor is the break-up of Sarkozy's marriage to model/advisor Cecilia Ciganer-Albanez (Florence Albernel), the genuinely distraught politician nearly hits (and gets uncomfortably grabby with) his spouse when she leaves him for another man. Since the film opens on election night with Sarkozy twirling his wedding ring and repeatedly calling Cecilia, you don't need to know that anyone talking about "his friend Bill" (Clinton! those Americans!) while Cecilia looks up admiringly is going to be bad news. Chirac tells him as much in the bluntest possible way: beware of omnipresent advisors, for they'll steal your wife while you're on-stage. Lo and behold.
Cecilia comes and goes; a more consistent rivalry is with Minister of Foreign Affairs and Chirac prot�g�
Dominique de Villepin (
Samuel Labarthe), and the knives come out early. Literally: during a would-be peace-making dinner, Sarkozy holds up his steak knife and says "Time to sharpen your blade." A series of equally unsuccessful t�te-a-t�tes follow, the funniest of which is a seaside for-the-cameras meeting. The camera sardonically pans from a wrapped-up Sarkozy consuming his morning coffee in seeming solitude to the press corps dutifully photographing him. "It's Villepin!" the cry goes up, and suddenly the reporters fly down the beach, leaving Sarkozy alone. Cut to the pair making uneasy small talk at the table: Sarkozy congratulates Villepin on emerging from the sea
like Ursula Andress, and Villepin equally venomously congratulates Sarkozy on his mastery of the classics. Sarkozy suggests Villepin's ascent from the sea also reminded him of one of those Greek gods. Apollo, Villepin mischievously suggests? Yes, Apollo, Sarkozy quickly agrees, quite unaware he's actually thinking of
Venus. This is a uniquely snarky way of calling someone out for intellectual shortcomings.
The Conquest benefits from director of photography
Gilles Porte's glossy widescreen. Italian composer
Nicola Piovani's score conjures up a Fellini-esque carnival vibe routinely (Piovani scored his
Ginger & Fred and
Intervista), but that spryness isn't otherwise evident in this poker-faced account. That the film stops at exactly the moment Sarkozy's took over the republic is curious, suggesting either the pragmatic self-censorship of making a movie against the president or a deeper cynicism about how much it really matters who's in office. Rarely does the film's Sarkozy indicate any interest in actual policy issues, and his explicitly manifested disgust for the electorate covers the entire economic spectrum, from factory workers who ask rude questions at stump speeches to businessmen who want access to his meetings after making large contributions. Abstractly fascinating as a rare attempt to mount a critique of a sitting executive,
The Conquest is a series of sketches for an attack that stay away from wondering about his ultimate impact. The film's fascination with means of acquiring power is second only to its subject's.
Posted by ahillis at November 10, 2011 9:15 AM
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