L'Enquête (2015)
Directed by Vincent Garenq

Film Review

It was one of the most high-profile financial and political scandals of recent times, one that implicated not only one of Europe's leading banks in an alleged web of global corruption but also some of France's biggest companies and most prominent politicians.  The Clearstream Affair dominated the French headlines for more many years after the story broke in 2001 following the publication of Denis Robert's book Révélation$, and it ended up drawing in the two leading contenders for the French presidency in 2007 - Nicholas Sarkozy and Dominique de Villepin.  So controversial and complex is the affair (many questions still remain to be answered) that it would take a pretty brave and determined individual to even contemplate turning it into a feature film.  Vincent Garenq obviously thought he was up to the challenge, although the results of his mammoth undertaking would suggest otherwise.

Immediately prior to embarking on L'Enquête, his third and most ambitious film to date, Garenq won praise for Présumé coupable (2011), his dramatisation of the notorious Outreau affair, a French miscarriage of justice concerning bogus allegations of paedophilia.  This compelling drama, coupled with the director's previous experience as a documentary filmmaker of many years' standing, suggest Garenq is well-placed to bring the murky morass of intrigue that is the Clearstream Affair within the limiting confines of a mainstream feature film.  The problem for Garenq is not that the subject matter is uninteresting but that there is simply too much of it, and the director's mania for detail ultimately overwhelms him, causing him to deliver an incredibly complex film that demands an unreasonably high level of concentration from the spectator.  If Garenq was so concerned with factual accuracy, he might have been better off making a documentary (or series of documentaries) about the affair, instead of attempting the impossible and trying to cram as much as he can into one impossibly overladen political-judicial thriller.

Whatever faults L'Enquête may have, no one can accuse of it playing fast and loose with documented fact.  The film owes its meticulous accuracy to the fact that it takes as its source the two books that Denis Robert wrote in the early 2000s (Révélation$ and La Boîte noire) in which he laid out his allegations that Clearstream Bank was actively complicit in money laundering and tax evasion initiatives.  Robert gave up his well-paid job as reporter on the French newspaper Libération so he could get to the bottom of Clearstream's alleged criminal activities, but ended up in the dock himself when the target of his investigation hit back with a lawsuit alleging defamation.  What Robert uncovered makes fascinating reading and, regardless of whether any laws were broken, it gives us reasonable grounds to mistrust any arrangement between government officials, corporations and the financial institutions.  Robert may have been chasing the wrong fox (or perhaps not canny enough to catch the fox he was after), but his certainty that there was something rotten in the state of Luxembourg was ultimately borne out by the spate of prosecutions brought against some of the world's leading banks in the aftermath of the 2008 crash.

L'Enquête is a worthy film but it clearly attempts too much.  Not only does it try its damnedest to pull together the multifarious strands of the Clearstream Affair (which, if it were written up in full, would rate a close second to Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu as the most daunting piece of bedtime reading ever), it also shows how Denis Robert's involvement in the affair affected him personally, ruining his health, family and own financial situation in his obsessive quest to uncover the truth.  By dividing our attention between these two noble objectives, the film loses momentum and focus, so that we end up neither really sympathising with the lone wolf journalist locked in a seemingly futile David and Goliath battle with corporations and men of power, nor do we get anything much more than a vague understanding of what the affair was all about.

Under the weight of so much narrative content (which strains the spectator's concentration further with considerable location hopping around Europe and the Far East), the performances inevitably suffer, and neither Gilles Lellouche nor Charles Berling create much of an impact in their respective truth-seeking roles.  The scenes depicting Robert's home life provide an unconvincing and unwelcome distraction from the film's more interesting narrative strand which takes us into the noirish territory that featured heavily in the conspiracy/political thrillers of the 1970s.  Unfortunately, most of the latter is preoccupied with clandestine meetings in shadowy places which soon become repetitive, and there is insufficient tension and incident to make the film a compelling experience.  The mass of detail that Garenq sends our way in the form of mystifying numbers, lists and endless grey-faced individuals merely muddies the waters even further and what we end up with is something nearer to a black lagoon of tangled obfuscation than a clear stream showing us the truth.

Film Synopsis

In 2001, the French journalist Denis Robert sent shockwaves through the world of high finance with his public denouncement of the dubious business practices of Clearstream, a Luxembourg-based bank specialising in the transfer and holding of securities.  In his attempts to expose the bank's supposedly dodgy business dealings. Robert has an ally in Judge Renaud Van Ruymbeke, who is on a personal crusade to stamp out corruption.  Their separate investigations will lead them to conclude that Clearstream and several leading French firms are complicit in one of the most egregious financial scandals of our time.  Not only that, a number of French government officials also appear to be implicated...