Smoking kills
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Antoine Raimbault draws inspiration from the huge corruption scandal uncovered in 2013 by José Bové and his parliamentary aides, involving tobacco lobbies. A film about a theme without guts saved by actors.
The year is 2012. The European Commissioner for Health, John Dalli, has been dismissed under obscure pretexts. In the heart of the turmoil shaking Strasbourg and Brussels, a man asks himself, raising his mouth: José Bové. Who, with the help of his parliamentary assistants and an idealistic young intern, will investigate this brutal and unjustified dismissal – and expose a huge corruption affair in which the tobacco lobbies are involved, whose influence will discredit even the president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso.
After the Suzanne Viguier affair in An intimate beliefIn 2019, Antoine Raimbault continues to plow the furrow of procedural films with A matter of principle, where the labyrinthine arcana of “Dalligate” is revealed. The problem: the story, which essentially boils down to a series of meetings, interviews and explanatory dialogue, is anything but cinematic. And despite the efforts made (a chase at the train station, tension over a confidential file, a hidden romance), the film has a hard time getting out of the very loose system it has fallen into. Sometimes we feel like we’re watching a pilot Maigret formal, full of soft jazz, suspicious glances and “ah, well that was it” – the picture perfecting pipe.
A jungle full of acronyms
All this follows in spite of everything