Duval is a little
guy, slaving away while everyone else in the office celebrates, and
then he's handed a glass of champagne and a request for a report the
following morning. But none of the files are where they should be,
and after a few more drinks, and a fruitless night, he explodes.
Two years later he's
been out of work since the incident, he's a recovering alcoholic, and
out of nowhere he's offered a job. He's to sit in a room alone,
listening to audio cassettes of wiretaps, and transcribe the tapes on
an IBM selectric, leaving the papers on the desk at night. Then he
hears something worrying, which turns out to be a murder, and
suddenly he's at the centre of a conspiracy.
To this point,
Scribe suggests any number of films about surveillance in which the
unexpected or awkward is overheard or seen, those like The
Conversation, Blow Up, Blow Out, or more recently,
The Silence Of Others. But there is a crucial difference, in
that Duval is not an evesdropper (apparently, the original
international title for this film) himself, merely middle man,
functioning anonymously in a room otherwise empty but for his
cassette player and typewriter.
This is the material
of Kafka, or Melville's 'Bartleby The Scrivener', an existential tale
of a man lost in the system and faced with a decision about whether
to go on or resist. Calling him by just his surname suggests a sort
of anonymous everyman status. But the question soon becomes less
existential and more political. The typewriter itself recalls other
conspiracy films from the past, All The President's Men or
Three Days Of The Condor, and those point the way to where
Scribe is actually heading.
That path is set up
very cleverly, with clues dropped in. There is an election in
progress, and a slick candidate whose slogan is 'La France est la
Retour', a sort of Gallic 'Make France Great Again'. There is also an
ongoing French hostage crisis referred to in the background.
Scribe's title in
French is La mécanique de l'ombre, which
might be translated as 'the mechanism of the shadows'. This recalls
the TV series Spin,
whose French title was similiarly The Men In The Shadow, and signals
an ongoing sense of unsettling conspiracy and 'deep-state' in
France. And the real strength of the movie is the way it combines
that sense with the more personal shadows hanging over Duval. He's
admittedly apolitical, an office-man whose self collapses when he's
lost his job. He is in that sense, a modern man, an average Jo in
France, lost in the shadows.
This
is director Thomas Kruithof's
first feature (he also co-wrote the script) and he maintains a firm
grip on the mystery. Alex Lamarque shoots the film in a brilliant
collage of shadow and blankness; it moves between dark and less dark,
and never undercuts the mood. The score by Gregoir Auger is more
geared toward the traditional thriller, but works. 
But because this
film is about blank slates which need to be filled it, it revolves
around some fine performances: Denis Podalydes is exceptional as
Clement, who hires Duval: all control and domination, even when he's
engaged in crucial bartering with the authorities, but especially
with Duval. Simon Abkarian is a tremendous contrast, all unleashed
menance and energy, alternately affectionate and threatening, as the
man who drags Duval deeper into the world of spycraft. They are like
two magnets pulling Duval in opposite directions, until a third
figure enters the frame, a government man played by Sami Bouajila,
all bureaucratic menace, but with a lower energy than the other two.
But
the key to the film is Francois Cluzet's Duval. I wrote when he
starred in Tell No One
about his being the French Dustin Hoffman, and the comparison is even
more telling here. He
acts with small movements of the face, little tics, which make the
scenes between him and Clement as effective in their way as Hoffman
and Olivier in The Marathon Man.
As in Tell No One, he
has to deal with forces well beyond his control, which in the end
comes down to a crucial moment which I won't give away. The situation
is made possible by the addition of a love interest for him, a fellow
recovering alcoholic, played with more brilliant understatement by
the Italian actress Alba Rohrwacher. But just when she seems to be
impinging on Duval's existential dilemma, she becomes a plot device
used to exert pressure on him.
How
much you wind up liking Scribe will
depend on how much you appreciate its resolution. The French October
Surprise is something you should not be surprised by, but it
basically slides by as if it were inevitable. Duval's own situation,
again, is presented by allusion,
which I took as an open-ended question: the idea is that nothing has
really changed, nor will it. I might have enjoyed Scribe
as a more existential drama, I might have enjoyed it more as an
all-out thriller. Yet it is a beautifully constructed conspiracy
thriller that, despite its smaller focus, and in an almost throwback
way, is successful in its own terms.
Scribe (La
Mechanique de l'ombre) France 2016
directed by
Thomas Kruithof, written by Kruithof and Yann Gozlan with Marc
Syrigas and Aurelie Valat
On general
release
NOTE: This review
will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)
My obituary of Charles Webb, who wrote The Graduate and gave away virtually all the money he made writing, from film and from inheritance, is up at the Guardian. You can link to it here; it should be in the paper paper soon. It is pretty much as I had written it, but it really begged for more space; his and his wife's lives were so peripatetic, and they were so steadfast and true to their beliefs, their story deserved as much telling as I could give it.
I think the film of The Graduate, which seemed so 'anti-establishment' to some folks in 1967, was way behind not only Webb, as I say in the obit (he wrote the novel in 1963) but also behind the young people whom the film was supposedly speaking for. It seemed very much a mainstream approach to a mainstream view, and what we remember most about it is the comedy, not the angst that is supposed to lie at its core.
