Quai d'Orsay

at the first sigh, a splendid comedy. seductive for humor, impeccable performances, for the air of French style to banter itself , with grace and precise art. at the second sigh - portrait of contemporary diplomacy. the minister as image, the hard work of staff, the delicate international files, the solutions and errors and bizarre advice, the family life and the pressure of job, conflicts, expectations and selfish. a fundamental institution as a clock. or labyrinth. "Quai d'Orsay" has the virtue to be more than a good film. but a guide for see the international relations. sure, in an ironic note. but fair and useful. for understand the responsibilities of a great European power diplomacy. and for discover a new perspective about events of every day.

Quai D'Orsay (retitled The French Minister for some markets) is a likable and highly amusing French political farce from director Bertrand Tavernier, perhaps best known for 'Round Midnight. Quai D'Orsay presents the shenanigans within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with a wonderfully straight face, while delivering laugh-out-loud moments by the portfolio-ful. Thierry Lhermitte's turn as Minister Alexandre Taillard de Worms is delightfully effective, every bombastic centimetre the Gallic Jim Hacker, with no sense of the events around him, yet, unlike Hacker, he is brimful of arrogant confidence in the face of every disaster. His foil is not a scheming Parisienne Sir Humphrey, but his long suffering chief of staff Claude Maupas, excellently portrayed by Niels Arestrup. Enter Raphaël Personnaz as the youthful and politically naive Arthur Vlaminkck, then sit back and chortle as young Arthur learns the workings of the ministry the hard way, doing his best to manoeuvre through the eccentricities of the minister's characterful staff. Quai D'Orsay is an enjoyable film with plenty of smiles and laughs, yet at almost two hours, it does begin to feel a bit baggy after the first half, still well worth seeing however.

Arthur Vlaminck is a fresh graduate from a noted university is hired to be a speech writer for the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Alexandre Taillard de Worms. Arthur would soon discover that his new boss is vainly self-centered and overly meticulous. Despite saying he wants a speech which is direct to the point, he has a speaking style that tends to be pretentious and rife with quotes from classic political texts.

The script brings us in the thick of the daily goings-on in the French foreign ministry, as the busy bureaucrats address this and that conflict. While the superpowers, US, Germany and France, are mentioned by name, the smaller countries they have issues with are hidden under fictitious names, like Ludemistan or Ubanga. There are generous references to NATO and the UN Security Council.

The elegant egoistic slave-driver Minister Taillard is very well- portrayed by Thierry Lhermitte. You will feel sorry and root for the harassed and toxic Arthur Vlamnick as played by Raphaël Personnaz as he not only deals with his difficult boss, but all the other big egos in the staff as well. Nils Arestrup provides that balancing force as he calmly plays the efficient Chief of Staff Claude Maupas.

From the start, you already get that this is written as a political satire as you witness Taillard address pressing issues with his strange idiosyncrasies -- how he orders a rewrite without even reading the draft, how he makes papers fly around by merely entering the room, or how he wildly wields his neon highlighter as he goes through his readings. This pattern unfortunately tends to be repetitive and will lose steam as the film progresses.

Quai d'Orsay is based on a comic book by Abel Lanzac (pseudonym for Antonin Baudry) who worked at the French Foreign Ministry (known colloquially as Quai d'Orsay, after its location in Paris) as former foreign minister Dominique de Villepin's speech writer for several years.

In the film we have Arthur (Raphaël Personnaz) , a young speech writer for foreign minister Alexandre de Worms (played with relish by Thierry Lhermitte) who suffers from the minister's continuous barrage of shallow slogans instead of helpful directives. Tavernier has portrayed de Worms as a pretentious, shallow person with few redeeming features who appears to spend all his working hours highlighting quotations by his favorite authors with yellow highlighters. The film itself is a fast moving and reasonably funny farce focusing on the minister's helplessness in encounters at the UN, lunch with a Nobel Laurette, managing crisis at home (where he is ever reliant on the old hand Claude (played by the veteran actor Niels Arestrup) ad so on.

Quai d'Orsay passes the time quite pleasingly mainly thanks to fine acting and brisk direction but is not a high point in Bertrand Tavernier's body of work.

Satire as was defined in old Greek plays; was the art to just exaggerate reality and became a critic in itself. You do not need to mock it, or change. Reality is fine in itself.

Quai d' Orsay (or The French Minister ) is the tale of guy who has to make the French Foreign Affairs Minister's speech.

The interesting thing about the movie; is that it never loss focus on where it is going. The guy is just an accessory; the important thing is the absurdity of political events, of Ministers that are only actors and the people behind the scenes that really move everything. Acting are superb. Niels Arestrup gives an Oscar or Cesar deserving performance as the Chief of Staff; the guy that really moves the wires. Thierry Lhermitte as the egomaniac intellectual Minister is equally outstanding.

Let's hope this movie gets a proper release and find a public; because i t is perhaps the best French comedy of the year.