SMOKE SIGNALS (UNE AFFAIRE DE PRINCIPE)
An Antoine Raimbault film – released in Belgium on 8 May 2024
Antoine Rimbault’s second film (following Conviction (Une Intime Conviction) in 2018, in which Olivier Gourmet played the lawyer Éric Dupont-Moretti) is an adaptation of Hold Up à Bruxelles: Les Lobbies au Cœur de l’Europe (2014), a book that was cowritten by José Bové and Gilles Luneau retracing the events that led to one of the greatest scandals ever experienced by the European institutions: a plot to bury an anti-tobacco directive that John Dalli, the Commissioner for Health at the time, was in the process of implementing before being accused of corruption and then sacked, in 2012, over suspected links to the tobacco industry, followed by a botched investigation carried out by the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF).
Convinced of Dalli’s innocence, the Europe Écologie MEP José Bové (Bouli Lanners) decided to carry out his own investigation with a handful of faithful parliamentary assistants, thereby threatening to destabilise the European institutions and, in particular, José Barroso, then President of the European Commission. The film tells the story of this complex investigation, but also the sacrifices and efforts made by the team to secure the opening of a parliamentary investigation into the scandal.
Described as a classic big-screen thorn in the side of authority, a man sticking his nose where he shouldn’t, Bové, a major figure in the anti-globalisation movement and known for his strong positions opposing pesticides, GMOs, multinationals and globalisation, is portrayed as the very opposite of a career politician: while certain members of the European Parliament act only to scale the greasy ladder or keep their jobs, he seems interested only in the truth, even when his frequently frustrating struggles get him nowhere.
Bouli Lanners, who won the prestigious César award for Best Actor in 2023 for his role in The Night of the 12th (La Nuit du 12), plays Bové as a truculent man with a wry smile, a wicked gleam in his eye and a pipe constantly in his mouth, whose geniality and acts of provocation are sometimes a barrier to his being taken seriously. The (relative) success of the film is due in large part to the chemistry between the members of “Team Bové”, especially Clémence (Céleste Brunnquell), an idealistic “rookie” whose purpose on-screen is to assist the viewers’ understanding by explaining how the institutions work – as the mass of information to digest seems indigestible at times. As for Barroso himself, the ever-suave Joaquim De Almeida gives him an air of menace, along the lines of a baddie in a Bond movie, during his short but intense appearances.
Smoke signals is unfortunately by no means a complete success, hampered by its shortness with a running time of just one hour 35 minutes, preventing it from going into any depth on certain issues and blocking any aspirations it may have had to line up with the great political thrillers after the style of Costa-Gavras and Oliver Stone... In an excessively modern style, clumsily aping aspects of great American suspense films (omnipresent music, overly frenetic pace, occasionally messy narrative), the film would unquestionably have worked better as “just” a political drama than as a thriller.
Although it is not going to set the world of cinema on fire, it is still a fascinating watch thanks to its setting: Bové and his team stride down the interminable corridors of the European Parliament (in Strasbourg) under the European Commission (in Brussels), giving us an insight into their internal functioning, for instance with the never-ending meetings symbolising the slow speed of the process, but also the cynicism and apathy of some of the MEPs.
Raimbault ironically depicts the great circus of the European institutions, using the metaphor of revolving hotel doors: “you work for the institutions to benefit the general interest, you get chatted up by the lobbies and then you end up on the other side. Welcome to Brussels!” His staging accentuates the sprawling, almost labyrinthine nature of the disembodied, coldly clinical backdrops contrasting sharply with the modesty of the warm and likeable “man of the people” that people collectively see Bové as.
With moments of pessimism when dealing with the scale and ramifications of corruption, of a system in which conflicts of interests are commonplace, he avoids falling into the trap of depicting the institutions as rotten to a man, focusing instead on a group of deeply committed, modestly heroic men and women, setting out to show us that the general interest will always win out as long as the proper functioning of the institutions, admittedly difficult and oh-so-very fragile, can be safeguarded. The film ends with a sentence of hope, the credo of a group of men and women with integrity, who are prepared to risk their jobs to ensure that justice is done: “the problem isn’t the institutions, it’s the people who make them”. (Grégory Cavinato)