‘The Sitting Duck’ movie review: Isabelle Huppert takes on a new challenge
Legendary French actor Isabelle Huppert takes on a new challenge as the lead in Jean-Paul Salomé’s biographical thriller and legal drama. The Sitting Duck, based on journalist Caroline Michel-Aguirre’s 2019 book La Syndicaliste, tells the story of trade unionist and whistleblower Maureen Kearney, who, in 2012, famously alerted the press to questionable business dealings within the French nuclear industry. It is a complicated and dramatic story which goes through several distinct chapters, dealing with corporate misogyny and outright corruption, moving on to the risks involved in making that corruption public, escalating into threats and actual danger, and culminating in an intense courtroom battle.
Maureen Kearney faced challenges at work as a female trade union representative in a distinctly male-dominated industry, among executives who openly disdained women’s work and viewpoints. Accordingly, Huppert portrays her as composed, self-contained, and resilient, almost to the point of seeming cold and detached. Scenes from her private life dispel that impression, but her public persona is unemotional and unflappable, something that helped offset workplace assumptions about ‘hysterical’ women but which ironically came to work against her later.
Huppert manages to reveal Kearney’s human side and her weaknesses while making clear her intelligence, her dedication, and her fortitude in the face of a challenge, often and very effectively using trivial actions as understated but clear gestures of defiance. Kearney seldom expresses her feelings verbally, but seeing her emerge from a nightmarish experience, shake it off, approach the mirror and painstakingly reapply her signature crimson lipstick nicely illustrates her grit and endurance.
The film begins with a flash-forward to the main crisis of the story, a terrible attack on Maureen Kearney, providing only a general outline of the event before going back to the beginning and properly introducing her as a passionate advocate for nuclear plant workers. Things take an unexpected turn when she is handed evidence of a covert deal of Areva nuclear power company with China regarding the transfer of nuclear technology. From here, the film becomes more of a detective procedural, as Kearney does some investigation of her own before turning the information over to the media and elected officials. Anonymous threats finally lead back to the brutal attack, which is the film’s climax, leading to an extended police investigation which goes badly awry.
The aftermath of the attack, which included both mutilation and a gruesome form of sexual assault, requires a careful and precise performance by Huppert, and her character’s personality and emotions become relevant. The scenes that follow call to mind Huppert’s unique performance in the 2016 drama Elle, which dealt with the aftermath of a rape – to the extent that one has to wonder if Elle inspired the idea of casting Huppert in this role. Like the heroine of Elle, Kearney disrupts expectations by not responding to the attack in the conventional way.
She is “not a good victim”, to use one character’s telling phrase, and failing to react as a woman is expected to result in suspicion being turned against her. Kearney continues to present an impassive façade to her interrogators, but she is seen to be under stress, buoyed only by a few friends and her alarmed but endlessly supportive husband, Gilles (engagingly played by Grégory Gadebois). She is charged with a serious crime, taking us to the final act, which is primarily a suspenseful and slightly overblown legal drama.
While there is certainly enough intrigue in these events to carry the plot, the account tends to be a bit disjointed and includes precise legal and business details more appropriate to an extended news exposé than a dramatisation. What saves the film is the decision to keep Maureen Kearney as the central focus, to make it her story rather than a story of corporate scandal and intimidation. To that end, the choice of Isabelle Huppert for the lead role keeps the film watchable even when it delves into the minutiae of international trade. We are able to identify with Kearney, follow her through a series of ordeals, and feel her failures and successes to be ours.
A difficult and complex situation is made watchable partly due to its genuinely dramatic elements and even more by giving the story a warts-and-all heroine who is both courageous and truly relatable.