A Comedy Of Power

Considering the Conrad Black affair, the Enron scandal and the British Labour government’s refusal to investigate dodgy dealings with Saudi Arabia over multi-million pound contracts, corporate corruption has a high profile in the news media. Why Claude Chabrol’s latest whodunit - fraud, not murder - is called The Comedy Of Power remains a mystery. This is as funny as a court order.

The heroine represents those brave, single minded, morally squeaky individuals who bring down nations, cleanse unions of Lee J Cobb and curb big business’s habit of creating mutually beneficial cartels that drip feed the workers and gorge white collar fat cats with obese bonuses. In real life, such warriors for justice end up like journalists in Putin’s Russia. In cellulife, anything goes, dependant upon the generosity, or otherwise, of the writer/director.

Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert) is what they call in France an investigative magistrate, which means a mixture between a detective with extraordinary powers of search and arrest and a presiding judge who decides whether there is a case to answer, or simply a question of too much slime in the cogs. She is the size of a table lamp, only thinner, with a degree of determination that cuts the legs off anyone foolish enough to think she's a soft touch. Even her husband (Robin Renucci) comes to feel irrelevant, obsolete and a waste of space.

If it wasn’t for Huppert, who is riveting, even when she isn’t speaking, and Chabrol, who is so professional in his attitude towards storytelling, this might have looked like so many other movies with a solid socialist agenda. Jeanne is the outsider, intent on disrupting nursery games in the all male boardrooms (“I want the names behind the numbers”), so that Pass The Parcel doesn’t always contain over a million euros and end up in the party packs of everyone in the room.

As you would expect, The Comedy Of Power is sophisticated in its approach to corporate corruption. There are no severed heads in Jeanne’s baggage, only the machinations of the establishment to control an over zealous workaholic.

Although not officially a thriller, it has the feel and pace of one. Huppert continues to astonish in every new role – when is she going to play Edith Piaf? – and it is good to see Chabrol taking trouble, rather than going through the motions.