La Conquête (The Conquest) by Xavier Durringer

For the moviegoer interested by politics, that’s a satisfaction. But what remains after the viewing of The Conquest (La Conquête) may also be a feeling of frustration. Compared to Anglosaxon countries, France doesn’t have the tradition to represent on screen the image of political power, especially when it concerns the highest levels of the State. The Conquest by Xavier Durringer, was an ambitious project whose goal was to shaken the French cinema and to enter the circle of high-quality international films representing power, such as Stephan Frear’s The Queen or Oliver Stone’s W.

In a sense, it has succeeded. The Conquest is the first French movie showing on screen a president while he is still in office. It is a première and somehow a little revolution. Six years after the Robert Guédiguian’s The Last Mitterrand, one could notices with joy that France progressively adapts presidential figures on screen. A dozen of TV films have been shot and aired over the past years about political players and the momentum continues.

The Conquest goes from the day, Nicolas Sarkozy returns to the government in 2002 as a Minister of Interior until the day he got elected as President of France in May 2007. Many obstacles, both professional and personal, punctuate this long rise to power for the candidate who “did not only think about the presidential election when shaving”. Indeed, there is in this modern fable the necessary mix of jealousy, ambition and ego stuffs that makes a movie rhythmic and original.

The viewer will revive the problems the minister experienced with his wife, Cécilia, his “first adviser”, who left him and went away with her lover, publicist Richard Attias, before accepting the “deal” to return with him for the campaign. The audience will also have an interesting look at the “special” relationship between former President Jacques Chirac and Sarkozy as well as the work done by the “Sarko boys”, his half-dozen guys – “spin doctors”, advisors and long-time friends – that helped me rising to power despite Cecilia Sarkozy’s hate.

Overall, a special tribute should be paid to the actors, especially to the leading character played by actor Denis Podalydès, a sociétaire of The Comedie Française, who bears the movie and who, despite a few exaggerations in the performance and the mimics of Nicolas Sarkozy, plays incredibly well. Receiving the best actor’s award at Cannes would certainly not be a stolen honor.

But one of the movie’s interests certainly lays in the harsh competition between the former PM, Dominique de Villepin and Nicolas Sarkozy; a relationship made of jealousy, disdain, insults… as well as politician and media calculus. A forced association of both leaders in the Raffarin’s government that now takes a special and bitter taste as De Villepin is currently on Trial in Paris for the “Clearstream affair”, where he is accused of having ordered to destabilize Sarkozy on the long-way to the Elysée Palace.

Interestingly enough, the movie echoes somehow the news, that is to say the arrest last Saturday in New York of then-IMF director Dominique Strauss-Kahn, another major French political figure, with the reference to the sex’s need of politicians. But the weaknesses of the movie lie in the fact that nobody new is shown or revealed. The film has been such publicized by media and professionals - and long-time awaited by film-buff – that a feeling of frustration remains, especially regarding the ending. I am joining in that line, the film critics that say the movie is a “best of” of the Chirac five-year period and the consequence is that The Conquest’s weakness is a lack of real film scenario.

But at the end, what nobody knows of course is the possible consequences the movie may have as the presidential pre-race is starting. On the one hand, the film shows the contradictions, the “bling-bling style” and infinite lust for power of the candidate Sarkozy but on the other hand, it reveals how the self-made man loves getting one’s teeth into something, a quality that charmed and influenced a lot of its voters in 2007. What will the movie suggest to the audience, and though the 2012 voters, is the unknown factor. And that’s what makes it exciting!

by Pierre-Anthony Canovas