I... comme Icare (1979) - film review

The president of an unnamed western republic is shot dead at a public event and his supposed assassin is found dead a short while later.   An investigation concludes that the president was killed by a lone fanatic who subsequently shot himself.  Only one man disputes this conclusion, a public prosecutor named Henry Volney.  Suspecting a state cover-up, Volney takes charge of a new investigation and sets out to discover the truth for himself.  How convenient that most of the eye-witnesses at the assassination should have died before Volney has had a chance to question them.  Someone is clearly determined to prevent the truth from being revealed - but who?

Inspired by the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, I... comme Icare exemplifies the cynically minded political thriller, or néo-polar, that was highly popular in France during the mid to late 1970s.  At a time when high-profile scandals and conspiracy theories were filling the newssheets and fuelling a general disillusionment with rightwing politics, films of this kind became very much a part of the national Zeitgeist, hence the genre’s popularity.  I... comme Icare takes paranoia to a whole new level and draws heavily on the circumstances surrounding the Kennedy assassination, particularly on the theory that the president was the victim of a CIA plot, although the film’s setting is fictitious, a strange amalgam of France and the United States.  The failings of the Warren Commission (into the Kennedy assassination) are gleefully highlighted in the film, and it is no accident that the presumed assassin is named Daslow - an anagram of (Lee Harvey) Oswald, the man who went down in history as the man who killed JFK, although some believe he was a mere pawn in an elaborate CIA plot.

I... comme Icare was directed by Henri Verneuil, one of France’s most prolific and most well-regarded mainstream filmmakers.  Verneuil established himself in the early 1950s with his popular comedies, most of which featured the renowned comic actor Fernandel, but it was not until the late 1960s that he came into his own with his stylish American-style thrillers.  His more successful forays into the thriller genre include the superlative gangster film Le Clan des Siciliens (1969) and the pacy action thriller Peur sur la ville (1975), both of which were major box office hits.  Verneuil’s later films policiers are some of the most sophisticated to come before a mainstream French cinema audience of the day and stand up reasonably well next to more serious offerings from Jean-Pierre Melville, the godfather of the French gangster movie.

The film is best-remembered for its main set piece, a meticulously authentic recreation of the famous psychological experiments performed by Stanley Milgram at Yale University in the early 1960s.  The experiments were intended to quantify various subjects’ willingness to submit to authority by putting them in a situation where there were required to inflict pain (through electric shocks) on another person.   The results of the study were a revelation (two-thirds of the participants were willing to subject their victim to the maximum voltage shock) and went some way to explaining the part played by ordinary men and women in such atrocities as the Nazi holocaust.   Although the sequence is only tangential to the plot and could easily have been omitted (shortening the film by at least 20 minutes) it is by far the most memorable part of the film as it leaves the spectator pondering just what barbarous acts he would be willing to commit, if the circumstances were right.

Whilst it is difficult to take some parts of I... comme Icare seriously (some of the plot contrivances are ludicrous in the extreme and stretch credulity to breaking point), the film succeeds in holding our attention by virtue of its compelling, cleverly constructed narrative and a magnetic central performance from Yves Montand.  The latter is superb as the lone magistrate who, with Columbo-like persistence, wades into a labyrinth of intrigue in a bid to unravel a fiendishly well-orchestrated assassination.  Having featured in several of Costa-Cavras’s political thrillers - notably Z (1969) and L’Aveu (1970) - Montand fits the genre better than perhaps any other French actor of this era, and brings a gravitas and humanity to the film that makes the threat his character is up against seem particularly real and disturbing.   With a little help from a memorably creepy score by Ennio Morricone, I... comme Icare is a masterfully woven thriller that still manages to chill the blood, and leaves you wondering if we are not all mere cogs in one great conspiracy.

© James Travers 2011

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