Discussions of Isabelle Huppert’s latest thriller should come with a trigger warning. What happened to real-life union rep Maureen Kearney, in 2012, was horrific. What she endured over the next five years was also barbaric. And if you like full-on happy endings stop reading now. Kearney’s story can be summed up by the phrase ‘no good deed goes unpunished’. And in playing the role, as you’d expect, 70-year-old French icon, Huppert, is magnificent.
In 2011, frosty, fragile, uncannily glamorous Kearney (Irish in real life, but played here as 100% French), is holding her own at nuclear engineering firm, Areva. When an Areva official, Luc Oursel (Yvan Attal), delivers a patronising comment about female employees, Kearney cuts him down to size with a deliciously-timed intake of breath (it’s plain as day: she thinks he’s a tosser).
A few weeks later, he becomes the head of the company. Soon she’s given information that implicates Oursel in a dodgy deal to expand China’s role in the nuclear energy industry (a deal that will be disastrous for Areva’s workers) and she prepares to share that news with the powers that be.
Instead, she’s assaulted in her home. A man covers her head, ties her to a chair and uses a knife to carve the letter ‘A’ on her abdomen, before shoving the handle of that knife into her vagina. As she later tells the police, “I thought he’d disemboweled me. I felt my intestines on my knees”. Unmoved, the detective on the case, (Pierre Deladonchamps), decides Kearney staged the whole thing. Weaponising details from Kearney’s traumatic past, he charges her with wasting police time.
In one of many quietly visceral scenes, Kearney is faced by a placid and implacable doctor, wielding an 8cm speculum. Later, she stands in court while a female judge subtly denigrates her for being the kind of woman who doesn’t wear “panties” under her stockings. At no point is a link made between this narrative and The Scarlet Letter, (Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel about an adulteress forced to wear the letter ‘A’ as a badge of shame), but both the book and the film induce shivers by exposing the gross misogyny of so-called respectable establishment figures.
I’d be the first to admit La Syndicaliste isn’t perfect (much of the camera-work is anonymous; there are multiple loose ends). But the nuclear force of Huppert’s performance makes such gripes irrelevant. La Syndicaliste shows how easy it is to destroy the lives of low-paid workers and those who represent them. No Gallic shrug from Huppert. She gives a damn.
In cinemas from June 30
122mins, cert 15
