Quai d'Orsay

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.

Anyone who's been confounded by bureaucracy at work will know that it's no laughing matter. Indeed, it can be the most frustrating thing in the world when an obvious solution presents itself, but red tape or bungling co-workers insist on getting in the way. It's a lot funnier when someone else is suffering the quiet ignominy of office politics, however, as evidenced by sparkling - if occasionally tedious - French political farce Quai D'Orsay (The French Minister).

The last thing Arthur Vlaminck (Raphaël Personnaz) expects is to get a phone call summoning him to an interview at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (known colloquially as Quai D'Orsay due to its location on the left bank of the Seine). He meets Minister Alexandre Taillard de Worms (Thierry Lhermitte) in a whirlwind interview, and is sufficiently impressed to agree to join the ministry as a speechwriter. As he meets his new co-workers, including the Minister's long-suffering chief-of-staff, Claude (Niels Arestrup), Arthur begins to realise that his boss' public persona might not quite reflect his private concerns or capabilities.

Anyone anticipating a grave, serious-minded look at the intricacies of French diplomacy should take note - Quai D'Orsay is really a raucous workplace comedy that happens to take place in the hallowed halls of the French Foreign Ministry. It's not that foreign affairs and public policy don't feature - they do. There's a ring of veracity to the proceedings, likely due to the fact that the film is based on the eponymous comic book by Antonin Baudry, which recounts his own experiences as a speechwriter for real-life Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin.

But the emphasis here is firmly on the comedy of the situation. Arthur's optimism begins to fade as he's plunged into workaday reality, much of which involves the minister's staff frantically fixing problems while he storms around in the background and screams truisms lifted wholesale from Greek philosopher Heraclitus. There's something almost tragic to Arthur's increasingly desperate attempts to write the perfect speech for Taillard de Worms - it goes through several iterations, the focus shifting (oftentimes nonsensically) as the minister's moods dance, sway and waltz away with logic and good sense. At every turn, Claude is frustrated in his noble efforts to ward off a crisis in Lousdemistan - a surrogate for Iraq - by bickering colleagues and the fretful fluttering of his foolish boss. The film is constructed firmly around Lhermitte's breathless and, ultimately, breathtaking performance. Taillard de Worms is a character who is, in effect, a human hurricane: he literally churns up paper flurries (and thereby makes a mess) whenever he enters a room, flinging out pompous statements in jogging shorts or dragging down a meeting with non sequiturs. A lesser actor would not have been able to play the minister's curious blend of insanity and incompetence - one which somehow works just well enough to make it credible that this character is somehiin power. But Lhermitte does so with flair to spare, whether Taillard de Worms is obsessively speechifying about the importance of yellow highlighters or terrorising a Nobel Laureate at lunch.

While the film largely works quite well as a farce, Quai D'Orsay suffers somewhat in its editing. After a point, Arthur's travails and his encounters with Taillard de Worms grow repetitive and even tedious, particularly when the film nears the two-hour mark. That could be partly the point - imagine what it must really be like to live and work with someone like Taillard de Worms day after crazy day - but there's really only so much bumbling incompetence one can take before the comedy becomes a tragedy. Tavernier's film is smart and savvy in its satire but, like its main character, starts to grate on one's nerves the longer it belabours the same point.

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.

Politics, it's really not my thing, as I see them all as manipulative power hungry wolves in sheep clothes, so a movie about a French minister isn't the kind of movie I would go for but as Quai d'Orsay is a political satire it was just what I needed to have a couple good laughs. Making fun about people that think they are above everyone is just funny. Although the story is a bit repetitive it was funny and that mostly because of Thierry Lhermitte who did a brilliant job playing the French Minister of Foreign Affairs Alexandre Taillard de Worms. The whole movie is about writing a speech for the Minister, a speech that is never good enough and that needs constant modifications, it's repetitive but it worked.

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.