La Fille de Brest (2016)
Directed by Emmanuelle Bercot

Film Review

Director Emmanuelle Bercot garnered considerable acclaim with her 2015 film La Tête haute which presented a moving account of the taming of a wild adolescent.  Her follow-up feature, La Fille de Brest, is a complete contrast - a medical thriller inspired by the biggest pharmaceuticals scandal to hit France - but is likely to be a comparable success, even if it doesn't quite do justice to its subject matter.  The film was over three years in the making, during which time Bercot and her screenwriter Séverine Bosschem gathered a mass of information by interviewing Irène Frachon, the medical practitioner who blew the whistle that lifted the lid on the scandal, and many of those implicated in the affair.

The authors' painstaking research shows in the film's meticulous attention to detail but in coming at the film from the angle of mainstream entertainment Bercot fails to get across the scale of Frachon's achievement.  What is also lacking is a sense of the enormity of the crime committed by the pharamaceuticals company that tried to prevent the blunder from coming to light, and how much damage was caused to the industry when Franchon published her book Mediator, 150mg: combien de morts? in 2010.  Bercot reduces the whole thing to the level of a primetime television thriller, a classic good versus evil tale with clear moral certainties and a neat ending. In reality, the story is far from over and many questions remain unanswered.

Allowing for its poetic licence, La Fille de Brest has a remarkable story to tell, one in which a lone woman doctor took on one of France's leading pharmaceuticals companies (Laboratoires Servier) and, through sheer bloody-minded persistence, won.  It was Irène Frachon, the girl of the film's title, who first established an incontrovertible link between heart failure and regular use of the drug Mediator, which had been on sale since 1976 as a treatment for diabetes and weight-loss.  500 people are known to have died from taking the drug, but the true fatality rate may be much higher, possibly running into several thousands.  In the public furore which followed the publication of Frachon's book, legal battles ensued and the company's owner Louis Servier was put on trial for manslaughter, not long after he was awarded the Légion d'Honneur by president Nicolas Sarkozy, his former lawyer.

All this would have made a gripping documentary, and this is perhaps how the subject should have been presented, with an unbiased perspective (unlike Bercot's film which is ridiculously one-sided).  By rejecting the documentary option and instead opting for a conventional kind of thriller, Bercot portrays Irène Frachon as a rather faceless heroine (in fact she is considered France's equivalent to the American Erin Brockovich, who fought a similar one-woman crusade against the energy giant PG&E).  The Danish actress Sidse Babett Knudsen (best known for the Danish television series Borgen) gives a fairly convincing portrayal as Frachon, stressing both her determination and her humanity, but it is hard to see from this film what made Frachon such an exceptional individual.  No doubt in an attempt to jack up the audience figures, Bercot constructs a neat thriller intrigue from the documented facts that is only barely credible and resorts to cheap sensationalism, including sequences depicting an open heart operation and an autopsy.

Knudsen suffers not only from a mediocre script which requires her to deliver the most unnatural dialogue but also having to be partnered with Benoît Magimel, who looks about as comfortable in the role of a committed medical researcher as Groucho Marx would be in an Ingmar Bergman film.  Magimel's inconsistent and exaggerated performance can again be put down to an over-emphatic script which turns Manichaeism into a fine art.  As a fairly conventional thriller, La Fille de Brest plays well enough.  It is reasonably well-paced, well-photographed and has no difficulty holding the spectator's attention, but as an honest tribute to one woman's courageous tenacity, and as a credible exposé of one of the most shocking corporate scandals in recent times, the film falls considerably short of expectations.

Film Synopsis

Dr Irène Frachon is a pulmonary specialist who works at a hospital in Brest in northern France.  In the course of her work she becomes concerned that the weight-loss drug Mediator, which has been on the market for thirty years, may be causing heart deficiencies in those who take it.  After obtaining firm evidence linking heart failure deaths to the use of the drug Irène attempts to go public with her findings, but she soon finds herself up against a corporate giant that intends fighting her every inch of the way.  Supported by a research scientist Antoine Le Bihan, Irène continues her private battle against the company that has made millions from the sale of Mediator, putting in jeopardy her career as she does so...