Russia has detonated a nuclear warhead over the Black Sea to underline its desire to revenge an assassination attempt on the Russian president. Germany and Italy urge restraint. The American president opts out of the standoff altogether and moots taking out Ukraine’s leader to appease Moscow.
A new thriller, which has brought nuclear anxiety to the red carpets of the Venice film festival this week, plays through what would happen next. In Jupiter, which premiered on the Lido on Friday, the duty to square up to the Kremlin and enter the stress-inducing mind games of the nuclear deterrent falls on the fictional French president Paul Archambault (played by the hulking French actor Denis Ménochet), who is backed in his mission by the British prime minister.
It’s a scenario that is far from unrealistic, the French film-maker Alexandre Smia said on the eve of his film’s premiere.
“Even if the US disengagement from Nato is not official, we have reason to doubt that the US would offer its nuclear umbrella if one European city were to be attacked nowadays,” said Smia, who has previously directed episodes of the French spy TV series Le Bureau des Légendes.
“And considering that France is the only country in Europe that is both a member of the European community, of the security council of the United Nations and of Nato, it naturally becomes actually the country where the responsibility of making decisions lies.”
He added: “Filling the void when faced by a threat is not even a choice any more, it becomes almost an obligation.”
Scheduled for release in France in November, Jupiter will focus minds but also divide opinion before presidential elections next April. After the release of a trailer, some voices on the far right have tried to dismiss the production as a “propaganda film” intended to shore up support for a centrist candidate against Marine Le Pen’s National Rally.
The film’s title, however, is far from a straightforward reference to the outgoing president Emmanuel Macron, who famously called for a “Jupiterian” head of state. François Mitterrand, too, was nicknamed Jupiter by the national press and the command room inside the bunker beneath the Palais d’Élysée, where most of the film’s action takes place, was named after the Roman king of the gods under Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.
In the film, the French head of state, Archambault, enters the nuclear standoff still reeling from the loss of his daughter – a biographical note that evokes Charles de Gaulle (who lost a daughter to pneumonia) and Jacques Chirac (who outlived his daughter Laurence).
The socialist ex-president Hollande advised the makers of the film during their research, and Smia said he had picked Ménochet for the role precisely because he did not physically resemble any previous president.
Yet while Jupiter is unequivocal about the need for French leadership, the film does not necessarily show that France is up to the job. To be taken seriously by the film’s Putin-equivalent character, its French president is forced to engage with Richard Nixon’s madman theory: giving off an appearance of irrationality to make otherwise non-credible threats seem credible.
It’s a move that risks incensing the French public and alienating the president’s political allies in Europe and within his own cabinet. “Would any European leader be able to play the madman?” asked Smia. “The theory of the madman is indeed dangerous and I don’t think that any European leader would do that.”
Lead actor Ménochet, who previously played a French president in Guy Maddin’s oddball G7 comedy Rumours, is best known to cinema lovers as a French farmer who crumbles under the interrogation of Christoph Waltz’s Nazi general in the opening scene of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds.
In Jupiter, his character must display the utmost mental robustness, especially in the face of personal insults by the film’s Russian president Chernov, who implies that Archambault’s daughter lost her life because of western “decadence”.
At screenings on the Lido, French journalists left the auditorium fiercely debating whether the film was an advert for a more aggressive French stance or a warning against it.
The sustained ambiguity of Smia’s film puts it in a line with a number of recent works of French cinema that are set in contained spaces, prioritise verbal sparring over plot twists and leave audiences debating moral rights and wrongs, such as courtroom dramas Anatomy of a Fall by Justine Triet and The Goldman Case by Cédric Kahn, who also plays a supporting role in Jupiter.
“This trend is very important and I hope it will become a movement,” said Smia. “In a time of simplification, films about moral ambiguities, about the difficulty of finding your own path and direction, are very, very important.”
