Mark Reviews Movies: KOMPROMAT

Kompromat, Magnet Releasing

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 26, 2023

Some opening text asserts that Kompromat is "loosely inspired" by a true story, which gives it about as much factual credibility as that carefully selected phrasing deserves. Surely, director Jérôme Salle and Caryl Ferey's screenplay becomes an increasingly contrived mess, filled with conveniences and coincidences and moments of questionable believability, as the plot approaches its climax. That the movie more or less gives away the nature of that climax in its opening minutes probably suggests how little confidence the filmmakers have in some elements of the material.

That's a shame, because the movie does occasionally work as a Kafkaesque nightmare about a man trapped in a foreign land, surrounded by forces hostile to his very existence, and accused of heinous crimes of which he knows he is innocent. Salle's strength here is in reflecting that sense of helplessness, as our protagonist attempts to navigate a labyrinth of legal processes, international diplomacy, and an entire internal system of government, media, and secret services that are set against him.

There are more dead ends than anyone—especially an ordinary person who has never considered such matters in any real way—could possibly anticipate. At its best, the movie is frightening because there's no way to understand the real motives or full extent of these systems—except to know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they will not stop until the intended target is either in prison or dead.

The target here is Mathieu Roussel (Gilles Lellouche), a French man living and working in Irkutsk, a Russian city in the region of Siberia. He's the director of the local Alliance française, which works to promote French culture in different parts of the world.

Much of the first act offers a series of flashbacks, as well as flashbacks within those flashbacks, to suggest how Mathieu might have unwittingly gotten on the wrong side of a variety of people. His maid saw him dressing as a princess to play with his young daughter. A wealthy oligarch funded a dance program at a newly renovated theater, only to be shocked and embarrassed, along with a large percentage of the local audience, when two men began kissing on stage. He and his wife Alice (Elisa Lasowski) are having marital problems, too, adding a bit to the suspicions of what might be happening.

The key insult—or the final among a series of perceived ones—might have come when Mathieu danced at a bar with Svetlana (Joanna Kulig), who just happens to be the daughter-in-law of Rostov (Mikhail Gorevoy), an officer with the FSB. The screenplay is of two minds about Rostov's motives: On one hand, the "why" doesn't matter, because the persecution proceeds regardless of the rationale, and on the other, there must be at least some explanation, since we're let into Rostov's methods, as he eventually brings in the ruthless man-hunter Sagarine (Igor Jijikine) for help, and Svetlana's personal life.

Both of those subplots undermine the suspense of not knowing why anything is happening and from where the next threat could come. Then again, the filmmakers do begin the narrative by teasing the movie's penultimate scene, so it's not as if Salle is consistent in establishing or maintaining tension.

Once the setup is out of the way and before the plotting falls apart, though, Mathieu's predicament is genuinely unsettling. He's falsely accused of distributing illegal images online and of sexually abusing his own daughter. Before he's even aware of the charges against him, Mathieu and his child are abducted by police, and as soon as he learns of the allegations, he is shipped off to prison, where the guards are rough, the other inmates are violent, and his attorney (played by Aleksey Gorbunov) insists on speaking the little French he knows.

Even after being placed on house arrest, the FSB keeps constant surveillance on him, and the machinations of the Russian legal system are moving ahead with an apparent presumption of Mathieu's guilt. If he's to escape this nightmare, Mathieu will have to somehow flee Russia.

The rest of the plot amounts to a lengthy chase and game of cat-and-mouse, with Rostov and his cohorts trying to track down Mathieu, while our protagonist tries to stay a step or two ahead of and outwit them. He gets some help, of course, from Svetlana, whose character is more a plot device than anything else. By the way, she only has that one meeting at the bar with him before putting her life at risk to help him, which makes for a good cover when the FSB starts asking questions but still doesn't offer a believable explanation for her motive. The course of their relationship takes a last-minute turn that attempts to emotionally justify everything that has come before it, but the result is only more confounding.

There's a fine and terrifying story at the core of Kompromat, but the filmmakers don't trust it. In attempting to simplify matters into a straightforward chase story, though, the movie becomes unnecessarily convoluted, less believable, and not nearly as compelling as it might have been.

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