Minority View: Les Patriotes by Eric Rochant blog

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This is a film that has gone unnoticed but it is so provocative politically that one even suspects that it has been suppressed deliberately. The Wikipedia entries for Richard Masur and Yvan Attal, who give outstanding performances in it, do not even mention the film. The dvd has no English subtitles and one has to manage by getting French subtitles and having them translated. Les Patriotes (1994) is a French spy film by a little-known filmmaker but it is a spy film like no other.

Unlike other kinds of thrillers that deal with aspects of the world that one is, by and large, familiar with, the spy thriller employs plot material and proposes devices that may or may not be a part of the real world. We are generally aware of police procedure and/or we understand why people act criminally and we can therefore say that a police thriller or a noir film is ‘˜truthful'. Espionage, on the other hand, belongs to a dominion hidden from the public and we cannot say with certainty that a spy film depicts an actual situation. The gadgets that spy films are prone to using - cars that perform as submarines and helicopters or masks that make someone look exactly like someone else - rely on our ignorance of the actual happenings in this secret realm. Gadgets - especially electronic ones - have another function and that is to induce us to drop the demand that we should follow the plot. In films like the Jason Bourne trilogy, for instance, we hear code words (‘˜Blackbriar') and we see numbers, names and icons flickering incessantly on a computer screen - and we are persuaded that we ‘˜understand' a conspiracy involving the entire world. Given these facts about espionage, the only ‘˜truth' we may assess in spy film are human truths - based on our understanding of people and politics - but this is still a better yardstick than any other. The most ‘˜truthful' stories about espionage come from John Le Carré but if we find Smiley's fight with Karla (in Smiley's People) plausible, this is largely because of our understanding of how normal people conceal themselves and how we need to penetrate this everyday subterfuge to understand and assess them.
Les Patriotes is different from most other spy films and it is not about spies triumphing over their enemies but about their efforts to get the better of their own allies - in friendly countries. In the film a Jewish Frenchman named Ariel Brenner (Yvan Attal) is recruited by the Mossad and trained in Israel to lie habitually - as a first step in grooming him as an efficient and dependable agent. He is so successful at this that he is snapped up by another even more clandestine Israeli agency and put in charge of a group entrusted with obtaining atomic secrets from a French nuclear engineer. He is the youngest but he is put in charge for reasons other than his experience - it will be disadvantageous to have a permanent hierarchy in a group of this kind.

The first step in Brenner's is to bug the target's telephone. This is done when a girl is sent to his home in his absence. She asks to use the telephone to speak to her boyfriend. Her conversation then becomes so tearfully personal (‘˜she is pregnant and her boyfriend is trying to dump her') that the engineer's wife leaves the room - in order not to overhear - which is when the telephone is quickly bugged. The engineer is not getting on too well with his wife and the next step is to get him into a sexual liaison with a prostitute. (Sexual blackmail is not reliable, a character tells another, and a Pakistani statesman, when confronted by the KGB with unambiguous pictures of himself naked with a Moscow prostitute, apparently responded: "I'll take ten of this and eleven of that.") Still, it would be preferable a second line of attack and a sexual relationship would be useful. The engineer's sexual relationship with the prostitute commences when his wife goes away for a few weeks after both her mother's legs have been broken and she needs to visit the old woman.
Another line is simultaneously tried to get the engineer to furnish plans pertaining to a project in an enemy country (presumably Iraq) - using money as bait this time. The engineer is duly helpful but when his conscience begins to bother him and he begins confessing to his wife, all it takes to quiet him is a brutal phone call. "When you are about it, why not tell her about the whore in the hotel room?" his friend on the phone line enquires. "I'll remind you of what you did to her on 12^th April if your memory happens to be failing you." The same Parisian prostitute - who begins to get fond of Ariel - is used in another liaison to kill an Arab nuclear technician. When the police discover the prostitute's involvement in the murder the girl herself is apparently done to death in a traffic accident.

The first and second parts of Les Patriotes are based on two different actual cases and in the second part Ariel's group spies on the United States with the assistance of a Jewish American (Richard Masur) in an American espionage agency - and his wife. This part of the film is brilliantly narrated. It involves trust and betrayal - the man is not doing it for money but because he believes Israel's cause to be sacred - and the confrontation between Ariel and the woman after her husband has been betrayed to the American law is deeply affecting.

Hollywood spy films about the CIA usually include panoramic view of its headquarters with ‘˜Langley, Virginia' appearing at the bottom; the only information to be gathered from this is that the CIA is sitting on some pretty valuable real estate. While Les Patriotes is shot partly in Tel Aviv, the film does nothing of this sort with the Mossad. The key action in the film is not set in impressive offices with high security equipment but on the street, in hotel lobbies, in apartments and shabby bedrooms, and the most advanced technology in evidence is the PC. Espionage is evidently dirty business and the realism of Les Patriotes comes from its acknowledgement that a moral person employed as a spy will have much to be ashamed of, making secrecy the most natural thing. This is very different from the Bourne films and their ilk, which are filmed as recruitment advertisements for spy networks.