Worth: $11.00
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Cast:
Gilles Lellouche, Joanna Kulig, Michael Gor, Aleksey Gorbunov, Mikhail Safronov, Sasha Piltsin
Intro:
… a serviceable near-thriller …
Kompromat (shorthand for Compromising Material) is a serviceable near-thriller, based on a book about the true story of Yoann Barbereau, a French national who spent more than a year on the run, trying to escape the Russian authorities. It opens with a cliched forest chase, then a ‘5 months earlier’ title card, leading into the ‘how did we get here’ backstory. The film has its ups and downs until the climax, where it reaches its nadir, thanks to overwrought symbolism and mawkish emotion, not helped much by the swelling score.
Gilles Lellouche plays Mathieu Roussel, the Irkutsk director of the Alliance Francaise organisation. He lives in this Siberian outpost with his not-best-pleased wife and young daughter until one day when he’s arrested for a trumped-up charge of publishing child pornography. The reason for this fit-up isn’t quite explained – is it suspicions of spying or petty revenge? Maybe something else entirely?
Perhaps the audience is meant to be as clueless as Roussel, but the film doesn’t seem to have done its due diligence here. There’s even a weird hunting scene where a kindly, yet bigoted benefactor (Mikhail Safronov) tells Roussel that he’ll never fund his organisation again after watching a homo-erotic dance recital. Heavy-handed display of cultural differences…. check. Oh, and in more cloth-eared metaphor news, the Russian then shoots a wide-eyed deer which lies prone on the ground. Roussel simply swallows, just like the weak Frenchy they assume he is.
Lellouche is fine but has been much better with superior material and directors. Joanna Kulig (luminous in Pawel Pawlikowksi’s Cold War) plays Svetlana, Roussel’s guardian angel, and honestly, the amount of times she comes to his aid is freakish, almost like it’s been scripted… Her motivation doesn’t ring true either. She’s down for one brief meeting with Roussel and then a semi-pissed dance and chat at a bar. And suddenly, she’ll do anything for him, including risk her life at the hands of the FSB (modern KGB). Odd.
The scenes of Roussel on the run are well directed, aside from his uber-convenient ‘get out of jail free cards’, and the politics of the Embassy staff drag the film back to the intense French drama genre that it never really sticks to. Not the worst, but surely there were better ways to deliver this story.
