‘My name is Maureen Kearney. I didn’t lie. I didn’t make anything up.” This French drama about a blood-boiling real-life case of injustice is the story of whistleblower and rape survivor Maureen Kearney, who for four years lived with a criminal record: falsely convicted of wasting police time, accused of inventing her rape. It’s a political thriller that tells the story matter-of-factly, and is perhaps a little lacking in the pace department. But Isabelle Huppert carries it along with a performance every bit as gripping as you’d expect. (Kearney is actually Irish, but has lived and worked in France since the mid 1980s; Huppert plays her as French).
Adapted from a book by investigative journalist Caroline Michel-Aguirre, this is a film of two halves, beginning with the whistleblowing. It’s 2011, and Kearney is a powerful trade union official, going into battle for the 50,000 staff at French nuclear engineering giant Areva in her armour of full makeup and blond hair so immaculately blow-dried it could deflect arrows. Kearney has the trade minister’s number in her phone and can summon President Sarkozy to a meeting. (Rumour has it he called her “a hysteric in a skirt”.) She turns whistleblower after being handed documents revealing secret plans to sell off France’s nuclear technology to China.
In truth, you might get a bit lost in the tangle of conversations, dense with the names of French political and industrial insiders. Then the anonymous calls begin. One morning a masked man breaks into Kearney’s home; he ties her to a chair, carves the letter “A” into her stomach and sexually assaults her. The thing is, to the police, she is the wrong kind of victim. Why is she so composed? She doesn’t cry, and tells her story calmly, like she’s rehearsed it, the lead detective says. Kearney’s #MeToo legal hell begins.
Inevitably, there will be comparisons to Huppert’s role as a rape survivor in Paul Verhoeven’s Elle. Here too she is fascinating, icily controlled, fragile, traumatised; though La Syndicaliste is far more difficult to watch than Elle, knowing an actual person has lived this ordeal.