Director: Jerome Salle
Starring: Gilles Lellouche, Joanna Kulig
Distributor: Palace Films
Runtime: 127 mins. Reviewed in Dec 2022
Reviewer: Fr Peter Malone msc

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Rating notes: Mature themes, violence, coarse language, sex and drug use

A French diplomat in a Siberian town, is suddenly charged with child pornography, and is forced to plan and carry out an escape.

The title, as explained, is a Russian word. It suggests the English ‘compromise’ but that is only part of it. Kompromat describes a plan to discredit someone, an exercise in blackmail, creating false documents to compromise or to destroy that person’s reputation. And, the opening suggests, this is what happens in Russia – specifically in this story, Siberia.

This is the story (loosely based on a true story) of the Alliance Francaise director Mathieu Roussel in the Siberian town Irkutsk. Roussel is played by Gilles Lellouche, a veteran of many French films, often crime and gangster films, here having the opportunity to have a significant lead.

Roussel is well liked in the town. He is devoted to his little daughter but there is tension between him and his wife. The opening is an occasion where there is an avant-garde ballet for the townspeople – with them not reacting well to its evocative style. At the celebration afterwards, Roussel encounters a friendly Swedish woman, Svetlana (Kulig), married to an amputee veteran from the conflict in Chechnya, whose father is the local head of what was once the KGB.

Suddenly, Roussel is arrested, a dossier of accusations of him having child pornography on his computer, and a charge that he has abused his daughter. His put in a cell with brutal toughs, bewildered, denying the charges, interrogated and, with the magistrates against him, he potentially faces 15 years imprisonment with hard labour.

Eventually, the French authorities negotiate home arrest with an ankle bracelet. So, the audience is asked to empathise with Roussel, to experience his bewilderment, anguish and uncertainty.

And, as the drama goes, what else is he to do but plan an escape. At the beginning of the film, we see him in a forest, pursued by guards and being shot at. His escape is shrewdly done with a number of false leads, but the ultimate plan is to get to the Estonian border.

There is tension in the final pursuit, the aid of Svetlana and his devotion to her, a twist with a message from his wife, and the pursuit of a vicious military detective even to the Estonian border.

Life is very dark in Siberia and the film literally dark, becoming lighter as Mathieu makes his escape, then dark in the border forest. Released in 2022, in production before the invasion of Ukraine, the audience is not inclined to be sympathetic towards Russia.

Palace Films