Berlin International Film Festival 2006

Dir: Claude Chabrol

Not above the law, but its makers and masters, the sclerotic leaders of French society react with imposing indifference and move to clobber her investigation, first by pulling administrative strings, then by getting a subordinate to rat on her work, offering her promotion, and when all else fails, by the simple expedient of forcing her husband to jump out of a window. Did he jump, or was he pushed? It is all so sophisticated and all so very vulgar, all so very plush and nineteenth century, as the simple logic unravelling a paper trail of bills pushes one well-upholstered careerist after another into resignation, or disgrace.

The lawyer is, of course, herself a product of the same system and Huppert plays her as a tight lipped forager after detail, who happily uses the privileges of her office to humiliate her suspects. A taste of prison in investigative custody. A visit to a lush suburban villa to enquire who exactly had paid for the recently planted trees.

Correct and prim as a lycee student writing an essay, she resists temptation and proceeds with administrative correctness, which is of course, her undoing. Her place in their heirarchy is not so high that she can bend the rules and she fails to recognise that for the more successful of her contemporaries, rules only apply to subordinates.