Numéro une (2017)
Directed by Tonie Marshall

Film Review

For her tenth feature, prize-winning director Tonie Marshall gives free rein to her feminist impulses and serves up a timely full-on  assault on male dominance and brazen misogyny in the corporate world.  Numéro une (a.k.a. Number One) is a bold and well-meaning attempt to engage with one of the burning issues of our time - a woman's right to parity with her male counterparts in all spheres of employment - but it falls down somewhat with its mare's nest of a plot.

Marshall has been a fully paid up member of the feminist movement for some years, and earned her place in history by being the first woman to receive the Best Director César in 1998 for her widely acclaimed film Vénus beauté (institut).  No one can doubt her commitment to a worthwhile cause but her attempts to militate for women's rights in her art have so far been a tad lacking in conviction and efficacy.  Numéro une is the director's most overtly feminist film yet, but it somewhat mutes its own message with a lack of focus and superabundance of plot ideas that ultimately makes you wonder exactly what point Marshall is trying to make.

A somewhat awkward attempt at combining political thriller with morality play and character study, Numéro une is centred on an ambitious businesswoman's attempts to shatter the glass ceiling, regardless of the consequences to herself and others.  In this she is opposed not only by formidable corporate males who have no intention of admitting a mere woman into their closed circle of privilege, but also by her human limitations - her insecurities (which she tries to keep under wraps) and her preoccupation with her family, in particular her ageing father.

Marshall spares us none of the platitudes of how hard it is to be a successful woman these days and were it not for her choice of lead actress - a magnificent Emmanuelle Devos - we would struggle to have much in the way of sympathy for her over-reaching heroine.  Devos is a rare actress who can project both inner vulnerability and indomitable resilience at the same time, making her ideally suited for the role of Emmanuelle in Marshall's epic one-woman-against-the-world saga.  (The lead character's name can be read as an ironic dig at cinema's exploitation of women in an earlier, less enlightened era.)

Devos is such a compelling performer that you wonder why she is absent for so much of the time from the screen.  Too often, the focus shifts jarringly to poorly developed secondary characters in a myriad of subplots that only succeed in drawing us further and further away from the core narrative strand, Emmanuelle's increasingly fraught struggles to balance her professional and personal needs.

Richard Berry obviously relishes his role as the Machiavellian corporate boss Beaumel, but entertaining as his badass portrayal is, it is really little more than a flagrant O.T.T. caricature.  Far more convincing is Sami Frey as Emmanuelle's dying father - his low-key scenes with Devos help to bring out the human side in her character, providing a badly needed counterpoint to the rancid inhuman nastiness that characterises Marshall's jaundiced view of the corporate world.

With its excess of plot and dearth of fully developed characters, Numéro une looks painfully like a ten-part television series that has been aggressively concertinaed into a two-hour feature.  There is only so much that a performer of Emmanuelle Devos's capability can offer to make up for the obvious lack of discipline on the writing side, and here the contest is cruelly one-sided.  Francis Girod's La Banquière (1980) and Claude Chabrol's L'Ivresse du pouvoir (2006) both deliver far more convincing representations of women in positions of power.  By contrast, Tonie Marshall's attempt at fashioning a modern Amazonian is hazy and half-hearted.  Doubtless the director has important moral points to make, but these are muffled to the point of incomprehensibility by a topsy-like narrative that completely runs away with itself.

Film Synopsis

In spite of a prevailing mindset in the workplace that still prevents women from getting to the top, Emmanuelle Blachey has made a success of her career as an engineer and is now hoping to make her mark as a captain of industry.  Encouraged by the pro-women lobbyist Adrienne Postel-Devaux, she puts herself forward for the post of chief executive at a leading blue chip company.  Emmanuelle's attempts to stamp her authority on her new role are frustrated by her professional rivals, in particular Jean Beaumel, an arch-manipulator who has his own sordid reasons for ensuring that she fails in her job.

Further complications arise when Emmanuelle's number two is dismissed and attempts suicide, just as her elderly father has a stroke that confines him to hospital.  The fiercely independent career woman soon discovers that she is fighting battles on multiple fronts, in both her increasingly complicated private and professional lives.  Old attitudes to women in position of power continue to threaten both her authority and her ability to get things done, but despite all this Emmanuelle is determined not to be beaten.  Her enemies like to think they are still living in a man's world, but she will do everything she can to prove otherwise...