The French Minister

Synopsis: Alexandre Taillard de Vorms (Thierry L’Hermitte) is France's dashing Minister of Foreign Affairs. From his offices at the Quai d'Orsay, the ministry's home, he plans to brings his vision of world diplomacy to the United Nations.

A few years ago the British political satire, In The Loop was a big hit. Quai d'Orsay is its more refined French equivalent. Based on a graphic novel by Abel Lanzac, the nom de plume of Antonin Baudry who worked as a speechwriter for former French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, it is a hyperbolic but nevertheless entirely credible account of the Byzantine world of the top echelons of French political diplomacy, housed in a fine pre-Revolutionary chateau on the banks of the Seine on the Quai d'Orsay. This first-hand knowledge is the film’s strength but probably also, at least for a non-French speaking audience, it will also be a challenge.  Strength, because the depiction of the day-to-day madness is grounded in precise observation, a challenge because it is so quintessentially French and so insistently verbal that it requires, if not a working knowledge of French culture and language, then, at least, a considerable fondness for it.

Centre-stage and delivering a wonderfully tongue-in-cheek comedic performance is Thierry L'Hermitte as Foreign Minister Alexandre Taillard de Vorms, a self-preoccupied individual given to communicating in idiosyncratic metaphors and quoting randomly from the greats of literature and philosophy, from Baudelaire to Heraclitus with occasional forays into popular culture (The Bridges of Madison County gets a guernsey at one point) as he sweeps from meeting to meeting blowing papers in every direction and exhorting his staff to share in his grand vision.

The rapidly-moving episodic narrative is built around the attempts of Arthur Vlaminck (Raphael Personnaz), a recent university graduate hired as a speechwriter by Taillard, to craft a speech for the Minister to give to the United Nations on the subject of a Middle Eastern country and its possession of weapons of mass destruction. Completely inexperienced, he is continually being pushed one way then another by various members of the Minister’s staff, headed up, in an atypically low-key performance, by Niels Arestrup.  As a script device Arthur, is the ideal agent through which to expose the goings-on in the corridors of power. Watching this film, one hopes that some clever writer is working on the Rudd-Gillard years which, one suspects, couldn’t have been any less absurd.

“Clever” is the quality that makes this film work. Quai d'Orsay is a comedy but, for the most part, of the intellectual stripe.  It’s not just in the literary references but also in the deft characterizations and the dry and wry dialogue that creates for us this narcissistic, manipulative world, nicely leavened by occasional forays into Arthur’s relationship with his girlfriend (Anaïs Demoustier).

The film ends with Taillard giving the speech that Arthur has been so selflessly working on. It is the actual speech (well, part thereof) delivered by Villepin to the UN in 2003, the only speech ever to have received a standing ovation from the members of that organisation. It's an age-old narrative device (compare, for instance, the recently screened Grace Of Monaco) but it’s done with restraint and  works wonderfully to situate everything that we have seen in reality, lifting it above satire or farce and making of the film a fine representation of the human comedy.

 

 

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