As a female union rep in the oppressively male-dominated French nuclear industry, Maureen Kearney the real-life heroine of Jean-Paul Saloms The Sitting Duck is accustomed to keeping a cool head in a crisis. That doesnt stop her male superiors from accusing her of the opposite, with then-President Nicolas Sarkozy allegedly branding her a hysteric in a skirt: In this mens club, a womans mere presence is deemed her weakness. Yet when Kearney is raped and mutilated by unknown assailants, seemingly as a professional warning, its her lack of hysteria under the circumstances that is declared suspicious by men in power. As shes first disbelieved, then charged without outright fabrication, Saloms film pivots from itchy whistleblower thriller to irate courtroom drama, with institutional misogyny as its binding thread.
A rape survivor criticized for her composure: sounds like an assignment for Isabelle Huppert, the star who essayed a comparable arc in Paul Verhoevens incendiary Elle, a highly dissimilar film that also probed societys narrow expectations of female victimhood, and distrust of women who deviate from the norm. As the Irish-French immigrant Kearney here rendered fully Gallic for dramatic purposes, albeit with a now-unlikely name the reliably thorny Huppert gives The Sitting Duck some much-needed crinkles of psychological difficulty and danger. Outside her performance, however, Saloms film unfolds as a strictly businesslike procedural: perfectly diverting, but with all the cinematic scope and style of a Continental Law Order spinoff.
In 2012, Kearney was discovered in her basement by her cleaner, gagged and bound to a chair, the letter A carved into her stomach with a knife left, handle first, in her vagina. Salom shows the attack in discreet shards, glitchily enough to preserve the mystery of the culprit, yet directly enough to ground the viewer in the victims truth. Our first extended look at Kearney comes in the immediate aftermath of the incident, following a gruelling medical examination: In the bathroom mirror, she fixes her blonde hairdo and applies severe, sirloin-red lipstick, ready to do battle again on the board of French nuclear multinational Areva. The workers she represents, she insists, cant afford for her to show any weakness, much less to take any time off: Call me if theres a horse head in our bed, she briskly tells her fretful husband Gilles (a fine Grgory Gadebois).
From here, The Sitting Duck swivels backwards, raking through the corporate skulduggery and snooping that could have made Kearney such violent enemies. Viewers unfamiliar with this period of French politics might feel a tad over-burdened with information: Names and alleged misdeeds pile up, though a critical conflict emerges when Arevas sympathetic female CEO Anne Lauvergeon (Marina Fos), a key ally of Kearneys, is dismissed in favor of shady, misogynistic power-player Luc Oursel (Yvan Attal). Kearney learns that underhanded deals with China are afoot, with many of her workers jobs on the line. She blows the whistle; things deteriorate from there.
Yet just as we get to grips with this intrigue, Salom and co-writer Fadette Drouard (adapting a nonfiction volume by Caroline Michel-Aguirre) pivot again, zeroing in on Kearneys ordeal and the infuriating investigation thereof. The police dont buy her story as the chief investigating officer, Pierre Deladonchamps is largely called upon to represent stony patriarchal implacability and Kearney is ultimately convicted of faking her own assault. The struggle to clear her name is a long one, portrayed by The Sitting Duck in largely journalistic, event-based terms: The laborious, dehumanizing formalities of the justice system are duly felt as the film approaches the two-hour mark.
A gritted, committed Huppert plays Kearneys fury at a low, passive-aggressive temperature that appropriately rejects grand emotional flourishes: Such flinty cool is what turned the law against Kearney to begin with. Still, we never get under Kearneys skin either; her interior tumult is observed from a distance as tasteful and impersonal as DP Julien Hirschs conventionally composed, evenly lit midshots. The Sitting Duck sacrifices discomfort and idiosyncrasy as a character study to more plainly valorize a done-wrong woman of the people. But its at least rousing on those terms, directing our anger at all the most deserving targets, all while retaining its own slightly bland calm.