La Syndicaliste film review — Isabelle Huppert turns activist in stark tale of injustice

Receive free Film updates

We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Film news every morning.

Truth-based French thriller La Syndicaliste is a film of difficult, disquieting moments. All the more so because they take place in venues that should be places of safety: medical exam rooms; government ministries; a home. And in corporate headquarters too, through whose corridors the film takes its first and most straightforward form. 

Isabelle Huppert plays Maureen Kearney, the trade unionist and whistleblower who in 2012 was working in Paris for nuclear power giant Areva. (Since broken up, much of its business is now owned by EDF.) At that point, the relentless but widely respected Kearney was managing a tricky relationship with a new chief executive. Soon, she was made aware of an apparent backstairs deal to sell technology to China. This and all that follows was detailed in Caroline Michel-Aguirre’s non-fiction book of the same name. Now, on-screen, a personal investigation begins. Relentlessness is a boon.

But much of that drama is held inside the paperwork, a cinematic snag director Jean-Paul Salomé seeks to balance out with basic genre trappings: meetings at open-air bandstands, unease in underground car parks. Still, the just-the-facts approach fits a narrative that swirls around familiar figures of recent French public life. (Kearney was well-connected too: the script drops the name of Nicolas Sarkozy, among others.) 

It also feels appropriate once events send the film in another, starker direction: the turning point Kearney’s rape in her own house, the attack seemingly connected to what she knows. The assailant vanishes; cops circulate; re-enactments are staged. Victim, grimly, turns suspect. “See, it was nothing,” Kearney is told by a medical examiner, with queasy double-meaning.

Earlier in her career, Huppert worked several times with that old maestro Claude Chabrol, who saw something in her that fitted completely with tales of crime and secrecy such as the great La Cérémonie (1995). But the darkness here is of a different order from Chabrol’s mischief: a tale of injustice and reality, retold with a scald of outrage. For all her endless magnetism, casting Huppert as Kearney can feel counterintuitive. An actress this brilliantly opaque playing an activist? But the steel in her gaze is another perfect match — for character, film and story.

★★★☆☆

In UK cinemas from June 30