La Syndicaliste: an oddly flavourless, distractingly shot procedural

• Reviewed at the 2022 Venice International Film Festival.

Now that we’re in the era of prestige television, the phrase ‘like a TV movie’ is not necessarily pejorative. So let’s make clear that if an easy summation of Jean-Paul Salomé’s La Syndicaliste is that it’s a ‘true-story TV movie that lucked into landing Isabelle Huppert’, it’s because of the film’s linear storytelling, hasty assemblage and glossy but uninspired photography. It may detail an intriguing, enraging real-life case of nuclear-industry intrigue and scapegoating, further kinked by the pervasive sexism that exists against professional women who refuse to play men at their own political games, but the main mystery in this oddly flavourless procedural is quite what the World’s Greatest Living Actress™ is doing here.

Huppert plays Maureen Kearney (in reality an Irish transplant to Paris, which is wisely never suggested by the none-more-French Huppert, but accounts for the none-more-Irish name), a tireless terrier of a union rep for French nuclear giant Areva. In 2012, she was found by her housekeeper bound to a chair, gasping through a gag, having been grotesquely violated – an event that acts as an attention-grabbing prologue, only for the film to spin back in time to follow the not-terribly-involving trail of international corporate malfeasance and double-dealing that led to it. The second, far more interesting half of this overlong movie describes the mounting fallout from Kearney’s ordeal, as opportunist politicians, choleric misogynist bosses, shadily motivated allies (including a sly Marina Fois as real-life former Areva CEO Anne Lauvergeon) and sceptical police officers (led by an underused Pierre Deladonchamps) conspire to cast doubt on it ever having occurred at all.

On very rare occasions, we get a flash of insight as the drama zooms in on Kearney’s disillusionment at being disbelieved; Huppert is given a little bit to do in terms of conveying the character’s inner conflict, and maybe even a hint of ambiguity. Otherwise, such qualities are in short supply. The action is all in the foreground and everything is in focus, except any blemish or line on Huppert’s face, which is made up and lit to a distractingly masklike smoothness. It’s presumably to hide the decade-and-change disparity in age between actress and character but, especially on the big screen, the absence of pores or laughlines becomes strangely distracting.

When asked why he doesn’t believe Kearney’s story, one character explains, “She doesn’t behave the way a rape victim should.” That line can’t help but recall one of Huppert’s most dazzlingly vital performances in Paul Verhoeven’s brilliantly transgressive Elle (2016); it’s a comparison that does the far more straightforward, far less provocative La Syndicaliste few favours.