I met Jean-Paul Salomé on March 26, in the attic of the French Institute in Bucharest. Salomé, wearing a filmmaker’s scarf, had come to the French Film Festival to present his latest film, La syndicaliste / The Sitting Duck, which was to be screened at Elvire Popesco Cinema. 

The film tells the true story of Maureen Kearney (played by Isabelle Huppert), a trade union leader for the French nuclear power company Areva. After revealing a secret deal with China, Kearney began receiving repeated threats, which culminated in a violent attack in her own home in December 2012. During the investigation, the French police began to doubt Kearney’s testimony, and she went from being a victim to being a suspect.

The film had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival. How was it?

Fantastic, absolutely incredible. We finished the film three or four days before the festival – we worked all summer to finish it on time – and then we found ourselves in this room with a thousand people. Many of the actors had not yet seen the film – Isabelle had – and they discovered it there. As a filmmaker, it was a wonderful experience, because it was the first public screening and I immediately felt that the audience perceived the film as quite brutal: there was a sort of shock in the room.

In Romania, Maureen’s case went completely unnoticed – as far as I know, it didn’t even appear in the press. What was your first contact with the story?

It was via a tweet about a book written by a great journalist from L’Obs, who had conducted a whole investigation. I read it right away and that’s how I discovered the story, because, like many other French people, I didn’t know about it. Very few people actually knew the story in France. And since making films is what I do best, I thought, “let’s try to make this story known through cinema”.

As for Isabelle Huppert, did she have any direct contact with Maureen? How did she build her character?

I had Isabelle read the book before we even started working on the script. She read it and said, “The story is amazing and the character is a powerhouse, so write the script and let’s do it!”. Therefore, I wrote the script with Isabelle in mind. Plus, there was a physical resemblance between the two that I had noticed early on, while reading the book and looking at pictures of Maureen. But Isabelle didn’t want to meet Maureen: I think because she didn’t want to impersonate her. Sure, she wanted to look like her: blonde, with bangs, glasses, and all; but didn’t want to go further than that. At the same time, without trying to imitate her, she simply became Maureen Kearney.

As a filmmaker, it was a wonderful experience, because it was the first public screening and I immediately felt that the audience perceived the film as quite brutal: there was a sort of shock in the room.

I know, for example, that some of Maureen Kearney’s close friends saw the film and said, “That’s you, it’s totally you, even the way you look,” despite the fact that Maureen Kearney has an Irish accent that was not adopted in the film. But otherwise, “it’s you.”

This is your second collaboration with Isabelle: you previously worked together on a comedy. I guess you already have your own “tango” when it comes to working together. Can you tell us a little bit about it? How rigid is the script? Does Isabelle change lines?

It starts before filming. Both times I worked with her, we sat down and read the script together. We read it and make changes. When we’re working on costumes, hair, and so on, we always talk about the script, and she’s like, “Are you sure about this?”. And it’s an iterative process, it happens with whatever questions come up along the way. Then there’s a sort of “work in progress” that takes place every morning before shooting, when I visit her in her makeup trailer. We talk again about the scenes we have to shoot throughout the day, we work through any concerns that may appear and she tells me if there is anything about the dialogue that she feels is not right or doesn’t add up. It usually takes about ten minutes: we recalibrate and then we’re good to go. It’s like a final touch-up. Isabelle is not the psychoanalysing type. Her aim is to make sure that the viewer understands what we wanted to say with each scene: “Is that what you want me to convey?”. She wants to make sure we’re telling the same story.

You wrote the script together with Fadette Drouard. Was it because you wanted to have a female understanding in the creative process? After all, it is a story about a woman.

Yes, I think I wanted to work with a female screenwriter precisely because I wanted this female perspective. And I also wanted to work with someone younger, someone from a different generation. I wanted to have this experience. We knew each other, we had met about four or five years ago, and at that time, I thought she would be a great person to collaborate with one day. The funny thing was, we even had different points of view: how to insinuate doubt about the protagonist?

What I’m interested in as an actress is conveying doubt and making the viewer doubt.

How do we make the audience understand that it’s men who doubted this woman? Because, at some point, doubt becomes the engine of the film. And I remember always saying to Fadette, “Yes, yes, we need doubt, we’ve got to have doubt,” and she’d say, “It’s not going to work, nobody will believe that this woman might be a liar and all that.” Nevertheless, I kept pushing the script in that direction because I felt it was important to do it that way. And now, she too sees that doubt is tangible in the film.

Maureen is, as they joke about it in the film, like Wonder Woman, she has this superhuman energy. And yet, at the same time, in the officers’ eyes, she is nothing more than a “bad victim”. Was this overtly feminist direction there from the start or did it come along the way?

It came very early on; one thing Isabelle felt very strongly when she read the book, and which she told me, was this: “What I’m interested in as an actress is conveying doubt and making the viewer doubt”. She wanted that very much, and I found it interesting. It was a question we asked ourselves very early on in the project, from the very moment we started writing the script. But I think it was highlighted during filming. Isabelle is the queen of doubt, she conveys it really well, and that became evident very quickly, so it was emphasised both during filming, through Isabelle’s performance, and in the editing.

One thing that I, as a viewer, would have liked for the film to explore more is the political aspect. Although there are politicians as characters, the film offers almost no verdict or even any political point of view, far from it, in fact. Why is that?

I was rather interested in the human side: why did the politicians treat her like that, why did they shrug and turn their backs on her? There’s something shocking and brutal about it, and that’s what I tried to show in the film. We had no intention to take a pro or con position in the nuclear energy debate – Maureen was a remarkable union leader in that world. And so, as a director, I felt it was not my place to give economic or political lessons, I wasn’t interested in that.

The driving force behind the real Maureen Kearney is justice, social justice. She wasn’t fighting to defend nuclear energy, but the 50,000 Areva employees. Because she feared that the agreement with China would have led to these 50,000 employees losing their jobs.

Still, I think that the civic spirit and the way the French defend their rights are much admired here, in Romania. How do you feel about the protests in France?

I think what we are experiencing now is proof that the dialogue between the unions and the government is not working. I don’t know whose fault it is, but given the situation in France and the way talks between the unions and the French government have gone so far, something is not working. The government does not listen to the unions’ demands and propositions, and somewhere along the way, the message is lost. So now we are facing a conflict that intensifies with each passing day.

Returning to the film, one of the things that makes it easier for you, as a viewer, to empathise with the story – which is otherwise shocking and very unusual – is this almost Kafkaesque representation of the bureaucratic process, which works like a snowball: each new moment brings yet another frustration on top of all the previous ones. What was the role of bureaucracy in the film?

I think it is proof that the judiciary is not independent and that, in this case, it was controlled from somewhere above, that the course of events was dictated by someone up there. You have the police officers leading the investigation who are under pressure from the prosecutor, who in turn is under pressure from the ministry, and so on – all these men are under pressure and end up making bad decisions. And the investigation fails because, at every level, you have men who are afraid. And at the bottom of the pyramid is Maureen Kearney, who has to contend with all of this. In any case, if there is something that has been well translated into the film, it is the fact that the law did not do its job in this injustice experienced by Maureen. And there’s someone else who didn’t do their job: the press. At the time, journalists did not tell this story. It remains an opaque and worrying matter what the press pays and doesn’t pay attention to.

Has Maureen seen the film?

Of course. The first viewing was very raw for her. It was also because Isabelle looks a lot like her in the film, so the scene of the assault, which she tried to get over… it was really hard for her to watch it on screen. But then she watched the film several times, in theatres with other viewers, and saw that people understood her story and had empathy for her. And that put her at ease. She helped promote the film in France: she took part in screenings, interviews – even with Isabelle – and Q&As.

The film is indeed quite brutal: it begins in medias res, and violence works like a catalyst for the story. Was that your decision from the very beginning – to make the viewer witness the atrocity that Maureen lived through? I think the moment of the assault could have also worked without actually seeing the abuse, though it’s certainly much more powerful and visceral that way.

I wanted to stylize it: not to make it like a documentary, but to experience the assault through Maureen, through her eyes. I wanted this POV, where we see everything from her point of view until she passes out. And I felt it was much more powerful than showing some simple violent images or going for some classic solutions, which have been done before in cinema.

Our goal was to make this story known.

In any case, as a filmmaker, I was much more interested in putting myself in Maureen’s shoes and seeing what she saw, through that bag on her face, than in setting the camera to watch from the outside as a simple spectator, as a voyager.

Because it’s easy to fall into some kind of exploitative sensationalism.

Yes, the scene was interesting precisely because the camera doesn’t work as an external character.

What are your plans as a filmmaker for the near future?

I don’t know what my next project will be about. Right now, this film means a lot to me, so I’m travelling the world with it. We are going to Italy next and Isabelle is coming too. Our goal was to make this story known. And I haven’t gotten closure with it yet, which is unusual, so I want to share in its journey as much as possible. Yes, I have some other ideas, but for the moment, that’s what I’m doing.

The film is distributed in Romania by Transilvania Film and will come out in cinemas on April 21.

Codrin Vasile

He studied directing at UNATC, where he wrote articles for Film Menu. He also wrote his degree paper on D.A. Pennebaker’s early filmography. He is interested in analog photography and video art. He hopes for a Criterion release of Shrek 2. He makes movies.