The other reviewer spoke about how good the imitators are here, and it's true. The actors who play the parts of Chirac, de Villepin, and a few of the other roles, look a great deal like their real-life counterparts. But that wasn't what most interested me in this very entertaining movie. This is really a no-holds-barred presentation of Sarkozy as a monomaniacal, power-hungry little despot. I couldn't imagine such a film being made about a sitting president here in the US. Even Michael Moore's depiction of Bush during the 9/11 disaster, while it ridicules him, comes nowhere close to this sort of thing. Nor does Frost/Nixon, which of course was filmed long after Nixon left office.
Where fact stopped and fiction/imagination begins I didn't always know. But this is one very devastating movie, all the more so because Denis Podalydes does not settle for some sort of caricature, which, given Sarkozy's personal ticks, would have been easy. He gives a very developed, well-rounded presentation of a rather frightening, and not really funny, individual - who could learn a lot about himself by watching this movie.
