Some compared the Clearstream affair to Watergate – others just shrugged and said “Bof”. Charlie Hebdo sweetly summarised the scandal by publishing a caricature of Nicolas Sarkozy as a demon, messily severing his political rival de Villepin’s head with a knife labeled “Clearstream”.

In L’ENQUÊTE (2014), a dramatisation of the Clearstream affair, writer/director Vincent Garenq refuses to be distracted by the media focus on this cat fight between de Villepin and Sarkozy. His film isn’t really about the historical event – it is the more personal story of a whistleblower journalist and a judge, and their shared passion for catching the fat cats with their trousers down. The idealistic reporter Denis Robert (played on-screen by Gilles Lellouche) put himself at great risk to expose high-level tax dodgers and state secrets, and in L’ENQUÊTE we see how he was driven to the brink of personal and financial ruin after falling into step with magistrate Renaud van Ruymbeke (Charles Berling), whose anti-corruption investigation followed him down the rabbit hole and into an Aladdin’s cave of war chests tumbling with dirty money. Garenq makes a bold attempt to articulate the dizzying complexity of such a vast and notorious financial/political scandal, but it just doesn’t translate well into big-screen drama. It’s in the nature of a dirty doing that the culprits will cover their tracks and lead their pursuers on a goose chase – and so it’s only natural that the untangling of the story is going to be as tricky as a tax audit for both filmmaker and audience.

the story accrues more “meanwhile”s than Snoopy’s “It Was A Dark And Stormy Night”.

If the affair had a beginning, it was in 2004, when arms dealer Gergorin showed a list of names to his good mate de Villepin, minister of foreign affairs. Allegedly, the people on the list had secret accounts with Clearstream (a bank for banks), funded by dodgy battleship swap shops in Taiwan. These illegal deals were already under investigation by magistrate Ruymbeke, who also got hold of a copy of the list. One name stuck out like a sore thumb: Nicolas Sarkozy, who was at that time President Jacques Chirac’s finance minister. Sarkozy and de Villepin were squabbling over Chirac’s presidential seat at the time, and after the list was ruled to be fake, the principal conspiracy suspects were Gergorin and his colleague Imad Lahoud, who became one of Robert’s principal informers. Sarkozy then accused de Villepin of conspiring to discredit him, by allowing the list to be made public. It was even suggested that Chirac himself endorsed the conspiracy. The Clearstream affair destroyed de Villepin’s reputation, and paved the way for Sarkozy to step up as presidential candidate. Journalists whisper to this day that the list came as no surprise to the sly Sarkozy, and that he allowed the scandal to flourish so that he could paint himself as the noble victim. His subsequent rise to poster-boy of the French right wing marked a fundamental recalibration in French politics.

It’s enough to give most filmmakers indigestion. To his credit, Garenq doesn’t cut corners or spoon feed us, but as the different layers of intrigue begin to pile up, the story accrues more “meanwhile”s than Snoopy’s It Was A Dark And Stormy Night. The giddying onslaught of locations, twists and characters dismantle the tension: the middle-aged men in suits who form the governmental and bureaucratic hivemind are as difficult to tell apart as a truckload of Agent Smiths, or Westeros bannermen. As a political thriller, L’ENQUÊTE has more authenticity than ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN, but it lacks the charisma and coherence of THE INSIDER. Director of photography Renaud Chassaing provides a sharp widescreen proscenium to rushed rendezvous in multi-storey carparks, and frantic mobile phone conversations at the wheel of Roberts’ car, but these scenes just can’t buoy the tension. Garenq’s roots are in documentary filmmaking, and the discipline and austerity of this format persistently leach through: at times L’ENQUÊTE feels like mutton dressed as lamb.

Expect no happy endings here – this story is grounded in real life, where you can literally get away with murder. L’ENQUÊTE illustrates one episode in a never-ending story, as evidenced by the recent HSBC Swiss Leaks scandal. It’s enlightening, depressing and frustrating in turns; as a drama, it leaves us without hope, whereas a classical documentary approach might have better served as a rallying cry for public protest.

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