Russians and their fake evidence ... Alliance Française in Siberia ... On the run from the FSB ... Svetlana to the rescue ... Suspense ... Miss Lumière at the cinema
Kompromat, the new film from French director Jérôme Salle, opens with a man carrying a backpack running wildly through a cold, grey European forest, being hunted by others.
A blood-red graphic states that Kompromat (KGB slang from Stalin’s time) means: "false compromising documents used to harm an enemy of the Russian state."
It also states the story is "very loosely based" on real events.
Any tighter, and asphyxiation might have resulted, given the two hours of relentless menace and political intrigue which follow.
Suffocation and oppression permeate every aspect of this grimy espionage thriller, set in a Russia of sleet and snow and ice, and lots of bald-headed men being not very nice.
The story centres on Mathieu Roussel (Gilles Lellouche) the newly arrived director of the Alliance Française, based in Irkutsk, Siberia, of all places. (There's good reason no one ever wants a table there).
French though he is (read cultured) the gormless Mathieu misreads the local appetite for Western art by presenting a modern dance performance featuring two nude men entwining, embracing, and quelle horreur, kissing.
Most of the assembled minor dignitaries, including a number of FSB (Federal Security Bureau) agents, are aghast and walk out.
Mathieu drowns his sorrows in a local nightclub, where he has the complicated good fortune to brush up against Svetlana (the luminous Joanna Kulig from Cold War).
She also happens to be the local FSB chief's daughter-in-law, miserably married to a legless and equally miserable veteran of the Chechnya war.
In the next morning's cold brown light, Mathieu's house is stormed by four burly men who escort him to the local magistrate, where he is charged with accessing child pornography and molesting his five-year-old daughter.
He learns his wife has deposed against him (under duress) and that he faces ten to fifteen years of hard labour, Russian style.
Joanna Kulig as Svetlana
Thrown into a filthy prison cell crammed with criminals, one toothless, tattooed inmate breezily informs him:
"There are three kinds of men here - men we respect, men we beat, and men we fuck."
Which rather puts the aforesaid homoerotic ballet in perspective.
Eventually he is allowed home detention (wearing an electronic bracelet) until his trial.
What follows are Mathieu's various attempts to escape his Kompromat fate, with the help of his court appointed lawyer - a wry, knowing performance by Aleksey Gorbunov - and Svetlana, with whom he develops a witty romantic connection, and who supplies him with an all important mobile phone, his ticket to freedom.
While the music is mawkishly overwrought, the tension is palpable, and not only in the scenes where he is on the run through Russia en route to the French Embassy in Moscow.
Once there, realpolitik rears its ugly bald head and Mathieu is told he must surrender to the FSB:
"There is nothing we can do," the urbane French Ambassador purrs, adding:
"For an Alliance Française director, you are very resourceful."
So resourceful, he manages to escape again, with the help of the pulchritudinous Svetlana, again.
Kompromat is a thriller with plenty of thrills, some significant idiocies, and some extraordinary strokes of good luck.
It's fast and sharp and unsentimental and very, very chilling.