It is normal for a film to begin with a title card informing us that it is based on a true story. What is intriguing about Kompromat, the new dramatic French thriller, is the addition of the word “loosely” to that statement. American audiences may be unfamiliar with Yoann Barbereau, a French national who escaped Russia after being falsely accused of child molestation, and that is just as well. Director Jérôme Salle takes the plausible details from Barbereau’s remarkable story, and infuses it with maudlin Hollywood bullshit. It is rare to see something with such a strange mix of verisimilitude and exaggeration that it culminates in the cinematic equivalent of an identity crisis.
Gilles Lellouche is well-cast as Mathieu, the director of Alliance Francaise in Siberia. Lellouche has a natural everyman quality, downplaying the terrible things that befall him. It is entirely clear what causes the FSB (the modern equivalent of the KGB) to target Mathieu. Maybe his sensibilities are too Western, or he is too familiar with Russian women, or maybe some FSB simply decides Mathieu deserves to be punished. Either way, he finds himself in Russian prison, where his life is immediately threatened because his fellow prisoners – all hardened men – learn the nature of the accusations against him. This stretch of the film is a bit like Midnight Express, with a foreign prison as a thinly-veiled metaphor for literal Hell. Mathieu’s lawyer negotiates a temporary house arrest, and yet he still faces a stiff prison sentence. Left with seemingly no recourse, Mathieu decides he must escape illegally.
Salle and his co-writer Caryl Ferey are not shy about their anti-Russia point of view. In a sense, Kompromat could not have arrived at a better time, since Western attitudes toward the country are the worst they’ve been in the post-Soviet era. This Russia is basically seen as a high-tech backwater, one where even decent people are helpless in a state that crushes any kind of alternative expression or Western thinking. But the film also oversells its critique, right down to mustache-twirling villains that would be too hammy in a James Bond movie.
Many of the caricatures make the conflict easier to follow, often to the detriment of its hero and emotional subplots. This is most apparent with Svetlana (Joanna Kulig), a Russian woman who takes pity on Mathieu and becomes his accomplice. This leads to a regrettable romance, mostly depicted in text messages between the unlikely pair. It is bad enough that we must endure this man using emojis to express himself, but then there is the implied insult that we would expect a fugitive from Russia’s secret police to use a traceable cell phone in this way.
The romance should be immaterial to Kompromat’s story, as Mathieu’s journey through Russia is dramatic enough on its own. He starts the film in Irkutsk, a city so entrenched in Siberia that you should probably look at a globe or atlas to see just how far it is from Europe, or the Mongolian border. Geography adds dramatic weight to Mathieu’s trek, to say nothing of how he uses clever tradecraft to elude the authorities at crucial moments. At its best, Kompromat puts us in the shoes of its protagonist, asking us what we would do in a similar situation. Does it make more sense to cross the border illegally, or seek salvation in your country’s embassy? Mathieu sees peril at every turn, so we understand his desperation when his only alternative is to finish his journey on foot, through a dense forest and the threat of wolves nearby.
Ultimately, the film glosses over the specifics of his journey, as if Salle lacks the skills as the director to make them unfold in a dramatic or thrilling way. Indeed, chase scenes can be perfunctory, and a final showdown between Mathieu and his top pursuer has clunky fight choreography. When there are so many physical obstacles in our hero’s destination, it can be irritating that the filmmaker embellishes them through bizarre discursions and one too many scenes that humanize him – the plight of an ordinary man wrongly accused is frightening enough on its own. A loose adaptation is one thing, and making choices to compensate for mediocre filmmaking is another entirely.
Photo courtesy of Magnet Releasing
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