Director: Jean-Paul Salomé (France, Germany). Year of Release: 2022
December, 2012. A large house covered with police “Do not Cross” tape. A man tries to get through the various police, acknowledging a couple of times that he is the husband of Maureen Kearney. On the police radio, there is talk of a knife attack and of a triangle being cut into someone’s stomach. The man is told to wait, then admitted into a room. There sits Isabelle Huppert – not dead, but a little shocked. Being Isabelle Huppert, her make-up is immaculate.
Before we learn what exactly is going on, we are taken back a couple of months. Maureen/Isabelle is in Hungary, where an interpreter is telling her the grievances of the local women working for the French nuclear firm Areva. Maureen listens patiently, then tells the women that she’ll sort everything out for them. Well, not everything, but they’ll get redundancy money. She confronts the pantomime villain plant manager who fobs her off, saying he’s following Hungarian law.
Cut to: France, where Maureen is having a cosy chat with Areva boss Anne Lauvergeon, Anne is remarkably impressed by Maureen’s suggestions of redundancy payments and a health plan, though the various men in the office look less convinced. Maureen and Anne put their cooperation down to female solidarity, although Maureen is soon ousted in a boardroom coup and replaced with the slimy outsider, Luc Oursel. Maureen leads the adulation of Anne at her leaving do.
An anonymous whistle blower tips Maureen off that Luc and his allies are having secret talks with “the Chinese”, which could result in China owning French nuclear power plants, and maybe even employing Chinese workers. Maureen confronts Luc, who first shrugs it off, and then throws a chair across the room at her in the middle of a business meeting. It is around this time that Maureen starts to receive threatening phone calls telling her to stay out of other people’s business.
We haven’t been going too long, and I’m already having all sorts of reservations. Both the French and German titles of the film translate as the (female) trade unionist, which give the impression that we’re going to witness some militancy. It could have been better called the (female) trade union bureaucrat – someone who lives in a house that the Hungarian power plant workers could only dream of, and prefers chatting with CEOs to organise serious action for pay and conditions.
Furthermore, the scandal that Maureen is trying to fight is hardly Ètlienne Lantier fighting coal barons. It is to stop foreigners from taking over “our” business. Not a word is said about industrial safety, and certainly nothing about little side effects of the nuclear power industry like Chernobyl and Fukushima. We are shown the world through Maureen’s eyes, and Maureen at best sees a slightly nicer world where sacked workers get redundancy pay and she keeps her big house.
What I’m saying is is this. It’s ok to come into Die Gewerkschafterin a quarter of an hour late. You won’t miss anything that you won’t be able to pick up pretty quickly, and you will be more inclined to feel a little sympathy for Maureen. And she will need your sympathy. The Real Story on which this is based is one of genuine scandal which has rocked the French government as it exposes the venality, corruption and sexism of people at the very top of French society.
Back to the plot. Maureen makes an appointment with new president Francois Hollande but on the morning of their meeting she is attacked in her home. This is where we came in. Maureen is tied and bound, and a knife is inserted into her vagina, where it remains until she is discovered by her maid 6 hours later. Despite the apparent wealth of evidence, the police are not inclined to believe Maureen and suggest that she tied herself up and fabricated the plot to gain attention.
This is where the fact that this actually happened starts to matter. Maureen is subjected to inappropriate police questioning and examination by doctors in cahoots with the police. They strongly suggest that because she was raped before – when she was about 20 and wearing “suggestive” clothing – she is essentially responsible for her own rapes – both of them. Add some depression and mild alcoholism, and the police pressure her into denying her original claims.
This is obviously an important film about a serious issue, and to an extent the casting of Isabelle Huppert is sufficient to have us side with Maureen. But it does not seem scandalized enough. Just as Maureen’s trade union activity largely consists of expensive dinners with the people who exploit the workers she is supposed to represent, she is rescued by chance events – finding a better lawyer and the one cop who is prepared to challenge hierarchy when a policewoman rats out her boss.
This may all be exactly what happened (though it seems likely that liberties have been taken). But the facts are arranged to make Maureen a pretty unsympathetic character. She is redeemed a little by her husband who spends his spare time slobbing around in Pink Floyd and The Clash t-shirts. But in a film which is supposed (among other things) to be about female emancipation, it is just not good enough to make a female character likeable just because she has chosen a nice husband.
I want to enjoy Die Gewerkschafterin, I really do. And I definitely want it to make people angry and demand justice for the real Maureen Kearney. It identifies all the right targets for our rage – from corrupt politicians and police, to male-dominated board rooms. But it feels so much in hock to the system which produces this sexist privilege that this is less a roar of rage than a pitiful whimper. Of course any film starring Huppert is worth seeing, but don’t set your expectations too high.
CinePhil 