While working on a sensitive file in the French nuclear sector, Maureen Kearney, played by Isabelle Huppert, is violently attacked at home by a group of hooded men. Gagged, she is tied up, raped, an “A” is drawn on her stomach with a knife. From then on, the film goes back and describes the fight of this trade unionist from the nuclear group Areva who seeks to warn regarding a secret contract between France and China.
In addition to media, economic and political pressure, Maureen Kearney finds herself accused of having fabricated her own aggression, of which the investigators find no trace. It is the fate of this woman caught in a Kafkaesque spiral that the film tells, which begins as a politico-economic film on the nuclear environment before turning into a paranoid and feminist thriller with a blonde, almost Hitchcockian Isabelle Huppert.
>> To see: the trailer for “La syndicaliste”
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An incredible story
This sordid affair which dates from 2012 was told in a book that Jean-Paul Salomé adapts here in feature film. “When I read the book, because of what happened to this character and what he was put through, I felt like I was in a dictatorship, when all of that is happened in France under the presidency of François Hollande. Not only did Maureen Kearney experience what she experienced, but then her word was called into question. There is a cascade of implausible things that stunned me, revolted and moved. These are all these emotions that I tried to put in the film”, delivers the director to the RTS.
This thriller film describes the political workings and the oppression of justice, but also attempts to depict this woman, her flaws and her fight. “In the first part of the film, in her role as a whistleblower, she is a kind of warrior, of today’s Joan of Arc who goes into battle with a certain faith, an innocence, perhaps a desire for the mission that drives him”, resumes Jean-Paul Salomé.
Isabelle Huppert and Yvan Attal in “La syndicaliste” by Jean-Paul Salomé. [Guy Ferrandis – Le Bureau Films]
Violence and power
A true portrait of a committed woman, the film implicitly denounces the scourge of sexist violence within male spheres of power. “She finds herself confronted with extraordinarily sexist situations, she is humiliated, also in her body. Innocent, Maureen Kearney does not measure the political stakes either, she is waging a social struggle. get there”, underlines for her part the actress Isabelle Huppert, who plays the main role.
Cinema in general is successful when it asks more questions than it answers.
The truth remains unknown
Maureen Kearney had to fight like a fury to prove her innocence. But if the word of this whistleblower has finally been heard, the public figures implicated have never been worried. And the truth regarding this case is still not established.
Radio subjects: Rafael Wolf, Virginie Langerock
TV Subject: Julie Evard
Adaptation web: mh
“La syndicaliste”, by Jean-Paul Salomé, to be discovered now on French-speaking screens.
