Un escándalo de Estado

A very nice piece. Slow deliberate and moody. It shows that supercops dealing with the drug situation in France sometimes are as crooked devious and profoundly criminal as the guys they are going after.

It shows a writer from Libération The left-leaning main newspaper in France the equivalent of The Guardian in England working together with a former informer and gathering information on one of the leading supercops.

The film is shot in what could be described as cinéma vérité or reportage and the sound quality is very poor throughout most of the piece. In fact the only way I could follow most of the dialogue was to watch the film with headphones and even then there were segments I could not catch.

It also has a quality in the filmmaking in the scenes which are presented which is kind of "décousu "(unstitched) by which one means it does not always obviously make sense why a scene stops and another one starts. One could almost see ripples from the 60s Nouvelle Vague in this presentation; style of delivery ....

All the same it holds together pretty well in the end. The final scene sort of a denouement in the courthouse is very cleverly presented and the main actor Vincent Lindon does a very good impersonation of a man who thinks himself whiter than white when it is clear that he is anything but.

The actor who plays the journalist also presents himself in a way that is plausible slightly weak a tad shallow and it is not always clear why the character is doing what he's doing.

All in all I would call this piece original in an interesting way. There are now so many films about drug trafficking drug Enforcement and they tread The same territory , This one displays a certain level of true originality in the way it is presented and for that only I would recommend it.