La Syndicaliste tries to be two films at once. On one hand, it is about corruption in Europe, or how politicians and businessmen line each other’s pockets. The other film, the more extraordinary one, involves a woman who was the victim of a strange assault and then was gaslit about the whole thing. The link between these two threads is the woman’s vocation: Maureen Kearney was a pro-labor organizer who lobbied for workers in France’s nuclear industry. Neither plotline is wholly successful, since the political thriller is too dense and Kearney’s story is too didactic, and yet the whole thing almost works because the lead actor is so compelling.
Isabelle Huppert plays Kearney, and the first scene we see with her is the attack in her home. Co-writer and director Jean-Paul Salomé shrewdly cuts away from the lurid details. Not only are they disturbing, but his screenplay calls their veracity into question more than once. Before all that – and for a significant chunk of the film – we see Kearney go to work. There was just an election in France, which means a new set of political appointees have an entirely different set of priorities than the previous president’s administration. In Averna, France’s nuclear authority that is a public-private partnership, Kearney sees a threat because the newly installed Hollande administration wants to strike a deal with China. The China deal would necessarily mean that Averna’s engineers and technicians are out of a job, so she raises hell. A thorn in the side of powerful people, Kearney receives threats and menacing phone calls, and so the attack against is not entirely a surprise to her.
Huppert leans into Kearney’s natural eccentricity. She alienates many of her colleagues, except for those like Anne Lauvergeon (Marina Foïs) who see her as a natural ally. Her husband Gilles (Grégory Gadebois) does not work in politics, so he is not a typical ally for a power couple. At first, Salomé relies on Huppert’s natural charisma: Huppert commands every room in which she appears, and then so must Kearney, although that charisma curdles into a kind of sick joke. After the attack, Kearney’s world shrinks into post-traumatic stress and endless interviews with policemen (only men) who do not believe her. The “straight from the headlines” approach adds urgency to the material, and yet the film cannot resist flourishes that make the material more maudlin or salacious than it requires. By the time there is a subplot about the lone policewoman who believes Kearney, the material is little more than a #MeToo story where every filmmaking decision, right down to Huppert’s performance, suggests a distrust in the audience.
We want to believe Kearney because what happened to her was awful. The details of her assault are humiliating, and yet she must endure answering questions about it in public, in one painful courtroom appearance after another. The recent film Anatomy of a Fall also showed the inherently probing nature of the French legal system, and its effect on a middle-aged woman. The key difference is how Salomé must rely on facts that can be too thorny, or byzantine for a compelling story, whereas Anatomy had the benefit of fiction that lets its creator burrow even deeper into its subject. La Syndicaliste cannot be illuminating because its story, full of recantations and political intrigue, must include omissions in order to avoid any kind of legal scrutiny. There might be a great film in this material, but Kearney and her colleagues are probably too bound to non-disclosure agreements to tell it.
Photo courtesy of Kino Lorber
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