After five decades in the business and more major acting awards than she has manicured fingers, Isabelle Huppert must have plenty of roles at her disposal. So it’s not entirely clear why she decided to try on Jean-Paul Salomé’s half-baked thriller for size.
Yes, the subject matter is genuinely interesting. It’s the true story of Maureen Kearney, an Irish union rep who was subject to a bizarre sexual assault after she accused an energy company of selling its secrets to China. But Salomé's jazz-soundtracked attempts to set this film up as a twisty-turny mystery can’t really hide the fact that it’s a thrill-free zone after the first few minutes.
‘But no matter, we’ve got one of the world's greatest living actresses on board! She’ll patch up the holes in the script!’, its makers may well have reasoned. And on a level, they’re right. Huppert brings an engaging mix of bolshiness and fragility to the role, clinging to her glorious, hyper-feminine uniform of silk scarves, lipstick and platinum blonde chignon as she flips the bird at her concerned, schlubby husband or dodges a chair flung by an enraged energy company boss.
At first, everyone’s sympathetic to her claims that she’s being intimidated by shadowy forces. Then the police start to think she faked the assault, and her life falls apart. But 70-year-old Huppert firmly resists crumbling – her heavily-made-up face shows little emotion. The psychological intensity of her breakdown is further dimmed by the low-budget, daytime-telly-drama feel of this film, peppered clumsily with a few ‘cinematic’ shots: a neon-lit car park at night, a covert meeting that inexplicably takes place on a bench in front of a massive snow-capped mountain.
Huppert brings an engaging mix of bolshiness and fragility to her real-life whistleblower
The film’s later scenes attempt a serious interrogation of the forces that silence rape victims. ‘You read a lot of crime fiction, don’t you?’ says a patronising male police officer, who thinks that Maureen’s failure to act like a teary, polite ‘good victim’ means she’s made the whole thing up. But any attempts at sensitivity are undermined by the near-pornographic intensity with which the camera lingers on Huppert’s face as her body is invaded by prying doctors.
La Syndicaliste is a weird footnote to Huppert’s long career, one that feels hampered by its ‘true story’ status to the point where it can’t really say much about anything. It’s quietly intriguing. But let’s hope her next outing gives her something that’s really worth dressing up for.
In UK cinemas Jun 30
