Film

Le Dossier 51 (1978)

Director: Michel Deville

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

An effectively sinister paranoid thriller, an exercise in voyeuristic point-of-view which consists almost entirely of the detailed surveillance file constructed by a foreign intelligence agency in an attempt to 'turn' a totally unwitting minor French diplomat. A sleek technocratic nightmare of the impossibility of maintaining privacy, it plays fearfully ambiguous games with its audience, inviting complicity in piecing together manipulatable 'evidence', while advising the wisdom of an over-the-shoulder glance, and reveals even such ostensibly healing techniques as psychoanalysis to be easily amenable to annexation to the impersonal mechanics of espionage. Compelling ammunition for the 'information is power' anti-databank lobby.

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