L’Exercice de l’État (2011) - film review

Minister of Transport Bertrand Saint-Jean is awoken one night by his cabinet chief and notified that a coach has fallen into a ravine.  Saint-Jean has no other option than to take charge of the situation, but in doing so he finds himself on the defensive in an increasingly complex and hostile world.  Power games and the economic crisis engender a series of national emergencies which will test the resources of men like Bertrand Saint-Jean to the limit.  Just how far are such men prepared to go, in a state which devours those who try to serve its best interest...

The immense personal toll of political office is powerfully evoked in this stylish, unsettling and, at times, downright weird film from director Pierre Schöller.  This is Schöller’s second film and it could hardly be more different from his debut feature Versailles (2008), an arresting drama centred on the unlikely friendship between a homeless man and an abandoned child.  The only thing that connects the two films is the delicate humanity with which Schöller handles his subject.  L’Exercice de l’État (aka The Minister) is no broad-brush satire of the kind that resorts to facile caricature and strained exaggeration to get easy laughs.  Instead, it makes a serious attempt to get under the skin of the career politician, to expose the Faustian conflict between ambition and personal beliefs that has wrecked many a promising political career whilst giving a real sense of the unremitting pressure government ministers are under as they try to meet the challenges of their job.  The film comes on the back of two other French film portraits of political life - Xavier Durringer’s La Conquête (2011) and Alain Cavalier’s Pater (2011).  Whilst Durringer’s film has attracted most attention by virtue of its subject (a humorous portrayal of President Nicholas Sarkozy’s rise to power) and Cavalier’s is the most experimental, neither of these films can match the visual artistry, narrative flair and authenticity of Schöller’s, which offers a far more nuanced and rigorous depiction of a life in politics (albeit from a humorous perspective).

Avoiding any direct reference to France’s present political figures (a wise move given how unpopular they all are at the moment), the film follows the fortunes of a fictitious transport minister, Bertrand Saint-Jean (superbly portrayed by Olivier Gourmet), and casts him as a modern tragic hero as he proves himself singularly ill-equipped to live up to the demands of his job.  Saint-Jean’s stamina and moral fibre are put to the test by a seemingly unending series of disasters and sly political manoeuvres that slowly whittle away his convictions and diminish him as a human being, until he ends up, as virtually all politicians do, as a mere warped shadow of his former self.  Nowadays, politicians rarely (if ever) arouse our sympathy.  Perhaps unduly influenced by the popular press (which loves nothing better than to destroy public figures), we are quick to condemn their personal failings and the apparent ease with which they abandon their principles for personal advantage.  What is particularly notable about Schöller’s film is that, whilst presenting politicians as deeply flawed, it never allows us to forget that they are human, and perhaps far more deserving of our pity than we are willing to admit.

Whilst L’Exercice de l’État is very much anchored in the real world (shockingly so in a few scenes), there is an abundance of humour (mostly of the dry, caustic variety) and some totally unexpected excursions into surrealism, the latter of which take us into the central character’s troubled inner world.  The film opens with a truly bizarre sequence in which a naked woman allows herself to be swallowed up by a crocodile.  An obvious allusion to the close liaison between power and eroticism which has marred many a political career, this sequence also serves as a metaphor for Saint-Jean’s willingness to allow his better side to be devoured by his greedy political ambitions.  It is not the minister’s political opponents or the cruel workings of fate that savagely chew him up, but his inability to hold onto his convictions in the face of unremitting hostility from those around him.   Saint-Jean’s mettle is assailed again and again, and each time he is compelled to surrender something of himself.   The minister is far from being a sympathetic character, and at times his ineptitude and duplicity are laughable, but Olivier Gourmet’s unstintingly humane portrayal of him compels us to feel for him and share his private sorrow as his dreams turn to dust before his eyes.   Many films have sought to enter the murky world of political chicanery and shed light on the tortuous psychology of the career politician, but few have quite the resonance of L’Exercice de l’État.

© James Travers 2012

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