'The Conquest' movie review, trailer: French president Nicolas Sarkozy seems power-hungry

BY MIRIAM RINN

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

MOVIE REVIEW

We’re accustomed to behind-the-scenes political dramas here (see: “Ides of March”), but evidently the genre is new for the French. So Zavier Durringer’s attempt in “The Conquest” to wring irony and drama from the story of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s rise to power and the concurrent breakup of his marriage to Cecilia Sarkozy must have seemed extraordinarily daring to the selection committee at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.

The French media have traditionally been more restrained in their coverage of politicians, and the political elite is still held in high regard there. That was abundantly clear in the French shock and outrage at the arrest of Dominique Straus Kahn, even before his accuser‘s veracity came under suspicion.

Opening in 2007, on the eve of Sarkozy’s election, the film moves back and forth between that date and 2002, when Sarkozy began his battle with then-President Jacques Chirac to rise in the center-right party. Sarkozy is eating lunch with his wife, scarfing down what looks like a Big Mac, an obvious jibe at his admiration for all things American. Cecilia snatches it out of his hand in disgust, the first of many stabs at Sarkozy’s culinary choices.

This movie really believes you are what you eat. Sarkozy has a fondness for sweets and eats bon-bons in bulk. (That must mean he lacks self-discipline.) At the elegant lunch meetings he attends regularly with Dominique de Villepin, he always seems to be guzzling his food, in contrast to his tall, graceful adversary. (A clue to his immigrant heritage?) The foreign minister saves his most cutting remarks for when Sarkozy has left the room, while the shorter politician is blunt and direct: “I’m alone and I’m free,” he snaps. “And you, Dominique, you’re a dead man.”

“The Conquest” doesn’t have much regard for Sarkozy, who is presented as a vulgar, striving hypocrite with no particular agenda besides personal power. Not that Chirac or de Villepin seem much better, just more stylish. The film is deeply absorbed in the intra-party machinations between the three central figures, which may gratify viewers knowledgeable ab out French politics, but is likely to mystify those who don’t know the difference between the RPR, UDF and UMP.

Very little time is spent on Sarkozy’s moves as minister of the interior in response to riots in Paris’s outlying slums. There is a scene of him visiting a police station, urging the cops to knock heads if they have to, and that may have been enough for French audiences. The writer Patrick Roman and director Xavier Durringer don’t care much about Sarkozy’s plans to wrench the French economy out of its self-satisfied passivity either. They want to know who leaked what to whom and when did Cecilia fall for the new PR guy--before or after she felt overshadowed by Sarkozy’s new campaign team.

“I didn’t choose politics; politics chose me,” Sarkozy proclaims, and “The Conquest” shows the guy in full political bloom. He knows how the game is played, and he plays it well. The cast--Denis Podalydes as Sarkozy, Bernard Le Coq as Chirac, and Samuel Labarthe as Villepin--resemble the characters they play and do a good job in portraying living figures. But the film is ultimately an inside-baseball production; enthralling perhaps for those knowledgeable about and obsessed with French political machinations, but not dramatic enough to engage a general viewer.