Le Dossier 51 is a French thriller film first released in 1978, directed by Michel Deville.  The film is based on a novel by Gilles Perrault and stars Françoise Béliard, Patrick Chesnais, Jenny Clève and Jean Dautremay.  It has also been released under the title: Dossier 51.  Our overall rating for this film is: very good.


Dominique Auphal is an important diplomat and a senior figure in ODENS, a European organisation involved with political exchanges.  An undisclosed foreign power intend to recruit him as an agent and sets about building up a dossier of incriminating evidence with which to blackmail him…

Possibly Michel Deville’s best film – certainly his most distinctive – is this disturbing political thriller.  The unconventional style of the narrative and the editing underscores the film’s main theme, which concerns the extent to which technology dehumanises society, reducing individuals to nameless commodities.

The story is presented from the perspective of the secret service of an unnamed foreign country – consisting of bugged conversations and images from hidden cameras.  The humour and raw emotions of the unwitting targets of the investigation – Auphal’s family and friends – contrasts with the inhuman clinical coldness of the secret agents who impassively dissect and analyse their victim’s private life.  They might just as well be the bank of computers which are revealed to us in the film’s chilling opening sequence.

The film’s lack of structure and uneven pacing might be off-putting to many cinema goers.  However, it does achieve its intended aim of showing us how technology can be misapplied to the detriment of humanity with calculated precision.

© James Travers 2001

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