Fictional French President Paul Archambault, as played with gimlet-eyed resolve by Denis Menochet in Alexandre Smia‘s “Jupiter” is, we’re cued to believe, a good man. Thrust suddenly into a lurching nuclear crisis, he gathers ministers and advisers around him and listens intently to their staunchly opposing views on escalation vs appeasement. They are also good men and good women, cleaving to the same basic humanist principles, while disagreeing volubly on how to put them into practise.
Smia’s film takes a more solemn, less kinetic approach than Kathryn Bigelow’s similarly themed “A House Of Dynamite” but shares its tacit, strangely idealistic faith that the people tasked with thinking through the unthinkable in the event of a nuclear threat, will be dedicated public servants of intelligence and integrity. Given what we know of the world today, the movie’s bid for ruthless realism is slightly undercut by its desire to believe that those whose fingers hover reluctantly over the nuclear button have steady hands.
Then again it’s possible that brooding President Archambault only appears to be so selfless because the constricted screenplay (co-written by Smia and Thomas Finkielkraut though there scarcely seems room for two writers) doesn’t give him much self to speak of. As the film begins, Archambault, already ensnared in the tight close-up that DP Nicolas Loir’s relentlessly focussed, somber cinematography will rarely allow him to escape, is receiving some devastating news involving his daughter. It will later be mentioned a couple of times, but this thinly sketched personal tragedy is all the backstory we’ll ever get. Even Archambault’s own political affiliations are kept unspecified.
