La Sainte Victoire (2009)
Directed by François Favrat

Film Review

Director François Favrat's follow-up to his highly promising debut feature Le Rôle de sa vie (2004) revolves around a similar conceit - an improbable mutually parasitic relationship between two disparate characters - but it fails to get much beyond the clichés of a well-worn and somewhat dated genre, the political thriller.  La Sainte Victoire owes its promising premise to a real-life judicial case involving a successful businessman, Pierre Botton, who illegally colluded in the political ambitions of his father-in-law in the 1980s and ended up with a two-year prison sentence. 

The principal shortcoming of this film is that it is hard to know whether it is trying to be an intelligent parody of a familiar set-up (the Faustian alliance between unscrupulous career politicians and over-ambitious businessmen) or merely looks like a parody because it is so superficial, caricatured and inelegantly constructed.  Favrat's screenwriting and mise-en-scène both lack the acuity and restraint of his far more impactful debut offering, although the film's most obvious flaw is a cast that feels unnecessarily starry, with the talents of most of the contributors (Christian Clavier, Sami Bouajila, Michel Aumont, Marianne Denicourt) pretty well squandered in ill-defined and generally unsympathetic roles.

The only cast member who appears comfortable with his character is the lead actor Clovic Corniallac, suitably cast as a devious self-serving opportunist.  Corniallac isn't the most naturally engaging of performers, but he succeeds where his writer-director fails, holding the ramshackle storyline together by sheer force of personality.  The overall impression is that La Sainte Victoire is a film that is trying too hard to make a statement without really knowing what it is trying to say.  The subject of the film is topical (political corruption is the one thing that never seems to go away in France, or anywhere else for that matter) but it has already been covered in many previous films, and far more satisfyingly than here.  After this let-down, Favrat would acquit himself admirably with his next feature Boomerang (2014), a taut little thriller adapted from a popular novel by Tatiana de Rosnay.

Film Synopsis

Xavier Alvarez is a budding architect in Aix-en-Provence who, despite his best efforts, fails to win the recognition and social standing that he aspires to and which he knows he deserves.  Alvarez is determined to advance both his career and his sphere of influence, so to that end he lends his support to mayoral candidate Vincent Cluzel, a rank outsider who, thanks to Xavier's various brilliantly conceived ruses, succeeds in beating his opponent.  But, once elected, will Vincent remember to repay the debt he owes his friend or will he instead devote himself to pursuing his own ambitions?