‘The Sitting Duck’ Review: As a Victim Fighting To Be Believed, Isabelle Huppert Anchors a Muted, Fact-Based Procedural
24.07.2023 - 08:07
/ variety.com
Guy Lodge Film Critic As a female union rep in the oppressively male-dominated French nuclear industry, Maureen Kearney — the real-life heroine of Jean-Paul Salomé’s “The Sitting Duck” — is accustomed to keeping a cool head in a crisis. That doesn’t 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 men’s club, a woman’s mere presence is deemed her weakness. Yet when Kearney is raped and mutilated by unknown assailants, seemingly as a professional warning, it’s her lack of hysteria under the circumstances that is declared suspicious by men in power. As she’s first disbelieved, then charged without outright fabrication, Salomé’s 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 Verhoeven’s incendiary “Elle,” a highly dissimilar film that also probed society’s 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, Salomé’s 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
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