La Sainte Victoire (2009) - film review

Xavier Alvarez is an architect in Aix-en-Provence who, despite his best efforts, fails to win the recognition and social standing that he aspires to.  To advance his career, he lends his support to mayoral candidate Vincent Cluzel, an outsider who, thanks to Xavier’s various ruses, succeeds in beating his opponent.  But, once elected, will Vincent remember to repay the debt he owes his friend or will he devote himself to pursuing his own ambitions?

Director François Favrat’s follow-up to his promising debut feature Le Rôle de sa vie (2004) revolves around a similar conceit - an improbable relationship between two disparate characters - but fails to get much beyond the clichés of a well-worn and somewhat dated genre, the political thriller.  The main difficulty with this film is that it is hard to know whether it is trying to be an intelligent parody of a familiar set-up (the Faustian alliance between unscrupulous career politicians and ambitious businessmen) or merely looks like a parody because it is so superficial, caricatured and inelegantly constructed.  Favrat’s screenwriting and mise-en-scène both lack the acuity and restraint of his first film, the star-studded cast feels nauseatingly gratuitous (only Clovic Corniallac appears comfortable in his role), and so the overall impression is that La Sainte Victoire is a film that is trying too hard to make a statement without really knowing what it is trying to say.  The subject of the film is topical (political corruption is the one thing that never seems to go away in France) but it has already been covered in many previous films, and far more satisfyingly than here.

© filmsdefrance.com 2011

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