27 June 2011

La conquête/The Conquest


La conquête is telling the story or stories about Nicolas Sarkozy's 'gateway to success' - if that's what one should call it.

First of all one can establish that Denis Podalydès in the role as Sarkozy is very lifelike and this goes for Bernard Le Coq as Jacques Chirac, Samuel Labarthe as Dominique de Villepin and many others. This is however not the primary quality of the film.

What we get to see is the game behind the curtains and all the different intrigues being such a inseparable part of politics - for better and for worse, often for worse.
As we now can see this film with much more knowledge about the events during Sarkozy's term in office ('National identity', transparance, "work more to gain more" etc.), the autobiography of Chirac published a year ago, the animosity between Sarkozy and de Villepin etc. we are perhaps able to understand or interpret the film in another way than if not having this understanding.
On the other hand, the director and the actors know as much as we know - or perhaps more - and it's actually first and foremost the director, Xavier Durringer, who displays his understanding of Nicolas Sarkozy and hist political opponents and followers.

The film is however a good piece of work even if these type of films seldom gives us more information than we already had. We are at least not able to know if the story told on screen is nearer to the truth than the things we read in newspapers and hear on TV and in radio.
The same goes for films like JFK, Oliver Stone's film about the murder of John F. Kennedy. Did he reveal something we hadn't heard or read about? I'm not sure.

One thing we know is that reality is always much more dirty and horrible than fiction is able to display.

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