THE COMEDY OF POWER (Claude Chabrol, 2006)

Corruption in Elf-Acquitaine, France’s massively profitable national oil company, is usually described in the States in terms of corporate embezzlement or sideline sexual improprieties; but it also revealed the astonishing tenacity of European colonialism, which has found ways of persisting under new guises past its official death. Western European nations other than France were eventually implicated in the scandal.
     Made by Claude Chabrol only a few years after the case was legally resolved, L’ivresse du pouvoir is a delicious satirical comedy—and in a genre that usually excludes humor for the sake of paranoid “realism” and stark suspense. Isabelle Huppert gives a fascinating performance as Jeanne Charmant-Killman, the driven investigating magistrate based on Eva Joly. Early on, the great pleasure of Chabrol’s measured, Hitchcockian film lies in sitting back and watching Huppert’s Jeanne make her arrested arrogant CEO, Humeau, squirm. Jeanne wants to make examples of miscreants. She is on the side of the angels.
     But the film gradually turns, downward, revealing a more surprising distribution of virtues and vices—and of power at a given moment. “Am I not supposed to be the most powerful person in France?” Jeanne asks of her boss with exquisite irony as she feels a vast conspiracy thwarting her attempt to arrive at the bottom of things. Humeau, it turns out, is not as powerful as he once seemed but only “a tree hiding the forest.” In his final encounter with Jeanne, in a hospital corridor, he suddenly strikes us as sympathetic and Jeanne, whose husband has attempted suicide owing to her neglect, less so. Power damages whosever foot it is on, and the presiding judge’s charge that Jeanne has “lost [her] objectivity” may reflect, may be, the truth.
     An exhilarating entertainment observing high-stake games of oneupsmanship.

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BLACK GIRL (Ousmane Sembène, 1965)

Senegalese writer-director Ousmane Sembène’s first feature is ruefully funny, painfully emotionally descriptive and, ultimately, sharply ironical. Its title, La Noire de . . ., consigns its spirited protagonist, Diouana, to the multitudes of anonymous souls who leave Africa and become stranded, lost in Europe. An also unnamed French white couple have lured Diouana from the breathing fabric of her Dakar community to their Riviera apartment. Their enticement: the job of caring for their children. France itself is a fringe benefit, but Diouana finds herself trapped in the apartment. (Her “escape” is mental—flashbacks of her life back home.) At first, the girl doesn’t even get to see the couple’s children. She keeps wondering where they are. Instead, she is set to washing laundry and cooking. When the three young children finally do materialize, all three jobs remain hers to fill: maid; cook; nanny. For all that, “Lazybones” is constantly scolded by her mistress for, well, everything: wearing the wrong shoes, not keeping her step quick enough, etc. This woman, we intuit, needs her meanness as some sort of outlet, given how completely her possessions and bourgeois comforts have absorbed her existence, and to bolster her wobbled sense of white superiority. (Recently a French colony, Senegal is now independent.)
     We know Diouana partly from her voiceover, which accompanies images of her, including those in the flat, sterile, stifling apartment. We thus get to hear Diouana’s intelligence and sensitivities at work—and as stream-of-consciousness, the twentieth century’s signature mode. Her being underscores and transcends individuality.
     Diouana struggles to maintain her grace, dignity, poise; but the only way to do that, it turns out, is to commit suicide—which she does in the bathtub! A lingering bother for her mistress!
     Diouana’s voiceover: its extinction is a piercing loss.