As France’s Jacques Chirac enters the final year of his presidency, a spoof documentary out this week looks set to become an instant hit with its caustic look at his 40-year rise to power.
Dans la peau de Jacques Chirac — which translates as Being Jacques Chirac — a 90-minute collage of archive clips irreverently narrated by a Chirac impersonator, screened to hoots of laughter in Paris on Wednesday.
”Very funny — tenderly devastating,” summed up one female viewer.
”It’s not a cruel film — but it’s realistic. It’s tender towards the man but cutting towards the politician,” said Patrick Brody (51).
”It fits the idea I had of Chirac: lots of gaffes. He seems kind of out of it — but underneath it all he’s not a bad guy,” agreed Pascal (45).
From his first steps as a politician in the 1960s, the young Chirac is shown as a suave operator, tirelessly criss-crossing the country to canvass voters and shake hands with anyone in sight — even once with a dog.
Using television clips spanning four decades, it shows him fighting his way to power with unflagging determination — and pokes merciless fun at the policy U-turns that have earned him the nickname ”the weathervane”.
”He should have been an actor,” said the film’s co-director, the television satirist Karl Zero. ”As a young man he had great looks — a true heart-breaker — and he believed in absolutely nothing.”
”Unfortunately for France, he chose politics.”
Produced by the Oscar-winning team that made March of the Penguins, the film is the latest example of what the left-wing newspaper Liberation calls ”Chiracophobia: the new national sport”.
Earlier this year, the best-selling book The Tragedy of the President, by political journalist Franz-Olivier Giesbert, blamed Chirac for a national drift into inertia, division and debt.
Though movie audiences seemed conquered, the press was more divided on the film, the first to lampoon a serving French president.
”Delicious”, wrote the popular newspaper Le Parisien, ”although in fairness what politician would survive such a treatment?”
Studio Magazine praised it as ”riveting and mischievous” — but the right-wing Le Figaro newspaper accused the filmmakers, Zero and Michel Royer, of scoring cheap points against Chirac.
”The same disrespectful treatment could be given to any number of politicians,” it argued.
Liberation meanwhile dismissed the film as a ”successions of gags” that delivered little in terms of analysis.
”It’s a laugh, all done in good spirit — but do we really expect from a head of state that he entertain us?” asked the business daily Les Echos.
As a judgement on Chirac’s legacy, the movie contrasts starkly with the elegant big-screen tribute paid to the late president Francois Mitterrand in last year’s The Walker in the Champ-de-Mars.
With its mix of archival material and total irreverence, it invites a parallel with US filmmaker Michael Moore’s award-winning Fahrenheit 9/11 — a fierce broadside against President George Bush’s administration.
The movie is most cutting on Chirac’s recent record, accusing him of cynically pushing a law-and-order agenda in the 2002 presidential election — which it says helped propel the far-right to the second round.
But Karl Zero denies having a political agenda, pointing out that Chirac is not planning to stand for a third term in next year’s election.
And indeed Chirac’s rivals past and present — from his predecessor Mitterrand to his former protege-turned-rival, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy — are not spared by the film’s biting commentary.
According to the director, ”It’s just the story of a guy who’s out to make it … living out a high-flying destiny, thanks to a kind of insolent good luck that turns each of his mistakes into a success”.
”Underneath it all, he’s very human, it’s really quite touching at times.” – AFP
