The French Minister

It is odd how the French talent for satire can sometimes give rise to no actual laughter. This film is one of those strange examples. The original French title is QUAI D'ORSAY, and for those who are unfamiliar with the meaning of that, it does not refer to the Musée d'Orsay so dear to all art lovers (which is inside a converted former railway station on the Quai d'Orsay beside the Seine) but to the French Foreign Ministry. Because of its address, the Foreign Ministry has throughout the whole of modern times been referred to by the French as well as all foreign diplomats simply as the 'Quai d'Orsay'. This film is a wildly satirical spoof on the lunacy that the French imagine (and who can say they are wrong?) takes place inside their Foreign Ministry. The Foreign Minister is played with rampant satirical flair and panache by Thierry Lhermitte. He portrays the Foreign Minister as a charming lunatic who constantly contradicts himself, and never, never, never stops talking. He is constantly quoting the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus (whose work survives only in fragments, many of which make great quotes), but rarely with relevance. The comedy is enhanced by the film containing many inserted full screen cards giving spoof quotations from Heraclitus which are, of course, nonsensical. If only this film showed the subtlety of satire at which the British excel, but it is too 'in your face' and slapstick. They are just trying too hard to be funny, and although they certainly succeed at being most amusing, I did not laugh once, whereas at a British film of that type I would undoubtedly have laughed often. (As for the Americans, they have never heard of subtlety in satire, and true satire is largely unknown to Hollywood, and is better found in a performance by the Second City group, who have never made it to the screen and remain firmly onstage as satirists.) The finest performance in this film is certainly by the wonderful Niels Arestrup, who despite his Danish name (his father was from Denmark) is as French as they come. He calmly runs the Foreign Ministry and deals with the continually recurring international emergencies amidst all the chaos around him, while his incompetent minister and the other hopeless staff run around in circles like mad dogs. No one ever notices that he is doing this. Let us hope that there is at least one Niels Arestrup in every French Government ministry, for otherwise the country could collapse under the weight of its collective political idiocy. And speaking of idiots, lest we forget the current President Hollande, his girl friend Julie Gayet appears in this film as one of the Foreign Ministry staff, though she makes no big impression. But then perhaps that is because I do not have a motor bike and have never learned her finer points. (Now that is subtle satire for you!) The omnipresent Jane Birkin has a good cameo in this film as a Nobel Prize-winning authoress whom the Minister wishes to meet and takes to lunch but talks so much himself that she does not get a word in. And for Jane not to get a word in is something! Hardly likely in real life. The director of this confection is the distinguished and well known Bertrand Tavernier. I wonder whether the French themselves laughed out loud at this film, and that my own laughless and wholly silent appreciation of it was merely a cultural artefact. Do I lack a Gallic organ? Such thoughts haunt me at nights.

Quai D'Orsay (retitled The French Minister for some markets) is a likable and highly amusing French political farce from director Bertrand Tavernier, perhaps best known for 'Round Midnight. Quai D'Orsay presents the shenanigans within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with a wonderfully straight face, while delivering laugh-out-loud moments by the portfolio-ful. Thierry Lhermitte's turn as Minister Alexandre Taillard de Worms is delightfully effective, every bombastic centimetre the Gallic Jim Hacker, with no sense of the events around him, yet, unlike Hacker, he is brimful of arrogant confidence in the face of every disaster. His foil is not a scheming Parisienne Sir Humphrey, but his long suffering chief of staff Claude Maupas, excellently portrayed by Niels Arestrup. Enter Raphaël Personnaz as the youthful and politically naive Arthur Vlaminkck, then sit back and chortle as young Arthur learns the workings of the ministry the hard way, doing his best to manoeuvre through the eccentricities of the minister's characterful staff. Quai D'Orsay is an enjoyable film with plenty of smiles and laughs, yet at almost two hours, it does begin to feel a bit baggy after the first half, still well worth seeing however.

Anyone who's been confounded by bureaucracy at work will know that it's no laughing matter. Indeed, it can be the most frustrating thing in the world when an obvious solution presents itself, but red tape or bungling co-workers insist on getting in the way. It's a lot funnier when someone else is suffering the quiet ignominy of office politics, however, as evidenced by sparkling - if occasionally tedious - French political farce Quai D'Orsay (The French Minister).

The last thing Arthur Vlaminck (Raphaël Personnaz) expects is to get a phone call summoning him to an interview at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (known colloquially as Quai D'Orsay due to its location on the left bank of the Seine). He meets Minister Alexandre Taillard de Worms (Thierry Lhermitte) in a whirlwind interview, and is sufficiently impressed to agree to join the ministry as a speechwriter. As he meets his new co-workers, including the Minister's long-suffering chief-of-staff, Claude (Niels Arestrup), Arthur begins to realise that his boss' public persona might not quite reflect his private concerns or capabilities.

Anyone anticipating a grave, serious-minded look at the intricacies of French diplomacy should take note - Quai D'Orsay is really a raucous workplace comedy that happens to take place in the hallowed halls of the French Foreign Ministry. It's not that foreign affairs and public policy don't feature - they do. There's a ring of veracity to the proceedings, likely due to the fact that the film is based on the eponymous comic book by Antonin Baudry, which recounts his own experiences as a speechwriter for real-life Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin.

But the emphasis here is firmly on the comedy of the situation. Arthur's optimism begins to fade as he's plunged into workaday reality, much of which involves the minister's staff frantically fixing problems while he storms around in the background and screams truisms lifted wholesale from Greek philosopher Heraclitus. There's something almost tragic to Arthur's increasingly desperate attempts to write the perfect speech for Taillard de Worms - it goes through several iterations, the focus shifting (oftentimes nonsensically) as the minister's moods dance, sway and waltz away with logic and good sense. At every turn, Claude is frustrated in his noble efforts to ward off a crisis in Lousdemistan - a surrogate for Iraq - by bickering colleagues and the fretful fluttering of his foolish boss. The film is constructed firmly around Lhermitte's breathless and, ultimately, breathtaking performance. Taillard de Worms is a character who is, in effect, a human hurricane: he literally churns up paper flurries (and thereby makes a mess) whenever he enters a room, flinging out pompous statements in jogging shorts or dragging down a meeting with non sequiturs. A lesser actor would not have been able to play the minister's curious blend of insanity and incompetence - one which somehow works just well enough to make it credible that this character is somehiin power. But Lhermitte does so with flair to spare, whether Taillard de Worms is obsessively speechifying about the importance of yellow highlighters or terrorising a Nobel Laureate at lunch.

While the film largely works quite well as a farce, Quai D'Orsay suffers somewhat in its editing. After a point, Arthur's travails and his encounters with Taillard de Worms grow repetitive and even tedious, particularly when the film nears the two-hour mark. That could be partly the point - imagine what it must really be like to live and work with someone like Taillard de Worms day after crazy day - but there's really only so much bumbling incompetence one can take before the comedy becomes a tragedy. Tavernier's film is smart and savvy in its satire but, like its main character, starts to grate on one's nerves the longer it belabours the same point.

Taking a break from the world of drama, and coming fresh off a 16th century period piece, Bertrand Tavernier tests his hand in the world of comedy. "The French Minister", adapted from the comic book "Quai d'Orsay", is a whimsical political satire, which never loses sight of its realist tendencies. A transparent parody of the US-Iraq conflict, substituting Iraq for the fictional country of Lousdemistan, "The French Minister" depicts the life of Arthur Vlaminck, the freshly hired speech writer for the French minister Alexandre Taillard de Worms. Throughout the film Arthur is consistently hurled through a sea of endless rewrites and bureaucratic minutia, all the while, balancing the verbose personalities of the diplomats with whom he is forced to work with.

The film is an absolute pleasurable viewing experience that places the viewer in rapid succession of loosely connected vignettes. Lacking the typical story structure, the film rather invites the viewer into the world of diplomacy and bureaucracy, in a fashion that seems more circular than linear. One of Tavernier's strengths throughout the film is his ability to match the spaces in which the characters reside to the signification of their position in the bureaucratic machine. The circular nature of the narrative, and the spatial and temporal order Tavernier utilizes, comments of the ineffective, even comic, nature of bureaucracy.

Contradiction and repetition form the basis for the film's humor, as Arthur is continually shuffled from room to room; failing to be able to distinguish advice from deception. Despite the clear notion that Arthur represents the film's main character, he remains vacant for large sequences. Further, in many of the scenes where Arthur and Alexendre appear together, Arthur's presence is completely dominated by the aura of Alexandre, allowing the viewer to disregard Arthur altogether. Similar to style of the great French filmmaker Jean Renoir, the film's absence of a strong central figure allows for the stronger analysis of a series of characters, each representing a larger part of society. In this manner, the audience is not forced into the psychology of any one character, but allowed to view all of the characters from a distanced space.

Thierry Lhermitte's portrayal of Alexandre, paired with Tavernier's visual treatment, fashions a dynamic and dominating character. His narcissistic and pretentious attributes are equally matched by charisma and charm. Lhermitte's performance performs a similar overwhelming task on the audience, as his character does on Arthur. Likewise, through Tavernier's added elements of comic heightening, while farcical, remain grounded at all times in realism. Depicted as moving with such intensity that his entrances consistently cause stacks of paper to explode into a whirlwind of chaos, obsessing over highlighters to a point of absolute comic absurdity, and neurotically referring to his texts, Llhermitte's character is rife with humor.

As a testament to the writing, the film requires no deep knowledge of the political workings of government, nor does it fail to seem applicable to US notions of government. Despite its intimate relation to French culture and politics, the film's comedy is universal. Requiring from the viewer only their attention span, "The French Minister" performs the rest of the work. Travernier's film is a humorous and imaginative romp just waiting to be discovered.

Originally published via StageBuddy by Joe Yanick http://stagebuddy.com/film-TV/review-french-minister/

Satire as was defined in old Greek plays; was the art to just exaggerate reality and became a critic in itself. You do not need to mock it, or change. Reality is fine in itself.

Quai d' Orsay (or The French Minister ) is the tale of guy who has to make the French Foreign Affairs Minister's speech.

The interesting thing about the movie; is that it never loss focus on where it is going. The guy is just an accessory; the important thing is the absurdity of political events, of Ministers that are only actors and the people behind the scenes that really move everything. Acting are superb. Niels Arestrup gives an Oscar or Cesar deserving performance as the Chief of Staff; the guy that really moves the wires. Thierry Lhermitte as the egomaniac intellectual Minister is equally outstanding.

Let's hope this movie gets a proper release and find a public; because i t is perhaps the best French comedy of the year.