Kompromat (M, 127 minutes)
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4 stars.
This based-on-a-true-story espionage thriller is drawn from the autobiography of Yoann Barbereau, a French national who evaded the Russian authorities after being falsely charged.
In the days of the Cold War, the Russians were cinema's favourite bad guy, so mysterious and unknown and easy to hate. As the cold thawed, filmmakers looked for new peoples to embody on-screen evil, lest they accidentally shut down Glasnost with a single action film, and the bad guys have since been South Africans, or Chinese, or whichever Middle Eastern country filmmakers felt they could get away with marginalising.
The Russians are again the bad guys in this new thriller by French director Jerome Salle.
They're the bad guys in real life at the moment so it's not much of a stretch, but in Salle's film, its the unsophisticated Russian regional tolerance and the ease at which its middle-level FSB operatives can rig its systems that are the evil in question, rather than an all-encompassing allegorical bad guy of the From Russia With Love or Red Dawn Cold War era of cinema.
Mathieu Roussel (Gilles Lellouche) is the new director of the Irkutsk branch of the Alliance Francaise, the French government's soft-power cultural centres they fund in cities around the world.
Trying to bring culture and ideas to Siberia isn't a cakewalk.
But Roussel is making friends and doing his best, though perhaps importing an avant-garde ballet with strong homosexual scenes wasn't one of his better ideas.
That's something Roussel has to ponder as his spends weeks alone in solitary confinement in a local prison having been charged with abusing his wife and daughter, charges he knows are false.
Was this show enough to scare the Russian authorities into fabricating these charges to have him removed? Was it something else?
He and wife Alice (Elisa Lakowski) had been struggling. She is miserable in their new Russian home and he has made a flirtatious friend in one of the Alliance Francaise's translators, Svetlana (Joanna Kulig).
But Svetlana's father-in-law Rostov (Michael Gor) is a senior figure in the local Siberian chapter of the Russian Federal Security Service FSB, once known as the KGB.
Rostov is embittered by the ravages the Chechen conflict had on the body and spirit of his amputee soldier son Sasha (Daniil Vorobyov).
He notes the friendly flirting and dancing between Roussel and his son's wife at a local nightclub.
A seed is planted, with Rostov forcing a false set of charges from Alice.
Out of prison in home detention and awaiting his trial, Roussel escapes.
Suddenly Rostov's lie snowballs.
The Russian state, as embodied by agent Sagarine (Igor Jijikine), is embarrassed and comes after the fleeing Frenchman.
There are almost two films in one here.
Much of the first hour of in Caryl Ferey and Jerome Salle's screenplay is inside Mathieu Roussel's mind.
The terrified and hungry prisoner has endless time to rack his mind for whichever of the many conversations, or friendships, or mishaps might have pissed some Russian agent off enough to get him locked up on false charges.
At the halfway mark, the film becomes a road movie, documenting just some of Roussel's cross-country journey to possible escape over the Estonian border.
The real-life character was on the run for something like 14 months.
He spent many months hiding inside the French Embassy in Moscow.
His is a ripper of a story, though Salle has to truncate much of it and consolidate many characters into a handful.
The second half of the film is a nailbiter.
It's so much fun and so satisfying, a contemporary take on the many films of agents trying to cross at Checkpoint Charlie.
This bloke crossed the entire Russian continent with a mobile phone and savvy use of PayPal.
The performances are enjoyably grim, with Kulig the standout as Roussel's guardian angel workmate.