When the CEO of France's Phenix Bank collapses on the golf course, a young bank executive, (Gad Elmaleh) becomes a temporary CEO. He'd like to be permanent, but he realizes right away that there is a very different agenda in play. An American hedge fund leader, Dittmar Rigule (Gabriel Byrne) is calling the shots and wants Phenix to purchase a worthless Japanese company, for one thing. If he does this, Phenix becomes worthless and the Americans can buy it for next to nothing. That's just one of his problems. His enemies attempt to distract him using a gorgeous model (Liya Kebede), whom he chases around the world. Elmaleh plays an antihero who is just as bad as everyone else with his wheeling and dealing, ambition, and disregard for the lives of others. He tells the stockholders that he is like Robin Hood, robbing from the poor to make the rich richer. It's what they all do. It's all a game, he tells someone at the end, and they're all children. They'll have fun until it all goes wrong. Meanwhile he travels, stays in the best places, and cheats on his wife.I read a few critiques of this, that it's too light and should have been darker. But it's based on "Das Kapital" by Karl Marx and works in Marx's ideas. Some of it seems caricatured and clichéd, but it's really just drawing on an ideology put forth by Marx and Mao Tse Tung. Like all of these corporation/banking films and documentaries, it's depressing. Last night I saw a film called "Common" where a woman's son is killed. She is getting money, but not in time to bury him, so she tries to borrow it from a bank. She can't. No, she can't, but everyone just piled money on Enron when they had nothing but dummy corporations and no product. Just threw money at them.I have to think, as Costa-Gravas seems to, that someday this will all go amuck, though in some situations, it already has -- the housing industry, Enron, Bernie Maddock, reported to the SEC countless times, but no one could be bothered to do anything about it -- and on and on. I don't have any answers. Well, I do, actually. The answer is Greed.

Basically good, sympathetic, or at least, interesting characters, you can relate to and care for, encounter obstacles, have to struggle for a while, but ultimately find their way through an unfriendly or simply indifferent world. We all love this type of films. "Capital" is emphatically not one of those, but is nevertheless worthy of attention.There is at least one character, however, who has not lost her moral compass, and still has some, albeit minuscule weight in the film: the wife of the main protagonist, a former economics professor, and now an ambitious CEO of a leading French bank. Her pull on her husband, however, is only marginally stronger than the one that his extended family, of apparently modest means, has on him. He has feelings for her, as well as for his parents, but those simply cannot compare in intensity to the thrill of money. He is a man who understands "the way the world functions", as he is not shy to explain when questioned. It is a game, in which, typically, rich get richer and poor get poorer, but the reverse is not impossible, as we are told, only improbable. He is cool, calculated, unemotional player, consciously going for high stakes. Just like the others, towards him often inimical characters, who he does not blame for their repugnant behaviour, although certainly would not mind occasionally smashing their heads onto hard surfaces nearby. Of course, we understand that he could not have possible been any different and still belong to the top executive branches of the financial world. Costa Gavras made his name in the genre of international political thriller, picking his subjects to be the most promising themes for such a film at a given time. It is already telling that he chose the world of high finance, and not of politics, as the most relevant field today. Indeed, the main character is addressed always as "the president", and he is treated as such by everybody he meets. He clearly lives in an entirely different world from the majority of even western, relatively well-off humanity, and his decisions, although made explicitly and exclusively for the benefit of the few, indeed affect, thousands of ordinary mortals. The bank that he directs, and pretty much all the interiors he ever dwells in do not fall far behind many European royal palaces. His world is the world of excess, but in his book it should be unapologetically so. There is a hint in the film of a possible difference between the old European, and the new aggressive, American business attitudes, that may exist only on the surface. American bankers that we meet maybe cannot pronounce Modigliani's name correctly, but they understand perfectly that their French counterparts are just as greedy, and motivated by the same basic predatory impulses, as they are. As the main character says on one occasion, almost defending his adversaries across the Atlantic: "They are just businessman, like us". The difference seems to be only that the French operate from the high-ceiling, well decorated, old world Parisian buildings, whereas their American partners for their machinations prefer flashy yachts and skyscrapers. The film certainly lacks the depth and the emotion of the very best Gavras' works, such as "Z" or the "Missing", but it functions well at the level of well written, competently shot, and expertly directed financial drama. It is an insightful, if not too original, commentary on today's state of affairs which to many will ring painfully true. There are also some fairly obvious flaws: the parallel thread with the "super model" that the main hero relentlessly pursues is rather stereotypical, and her attitude towards him appears far-fetched. It would have served the story's development better if the relationship with the multi-dimensional French female employee from London's office was introduced earlier and then further developed. This could have added some intellectual and emotional depth to the main character, beyond what was this way left only sketched. These comments notwithstanding, the film presents an entertaining and informative look at the dynamics of the modern world's new nobility.

Gad Elmaleh plays Marc Tourneuil, an employee at a powerful French bank, the Phénix, who unexpectedly becomes its president when his boss starts dying from cancer. Handpicked by him because he will be easier to control, Tourneuil turns the tables around when he starts going against the board members' wishes. His real challenge, however, comes when Dittmar Rigule (played by Gabriel Byrne), a financer running a hedge fund out of Miami, becomes the Phénix's major stockholder and forces it to adopt American-style wild capitalism. Tourneuil's first mission is to fire around 10,000 people in order to increase the stockholders' profits by 20%. That he does with aplomb, even after organising a world-wide video-conference with every Phénix employee and director to assure them that there will be no massive downsizing. But Tourneuil starts sensing a real threat to his survival when Dittmar insists in him buying a Japanese bank that a report claims to be in serious financial trouble. Guessing Dittmar's plan to make him look incompetent while debilitating the Phénix with a ruinous hostile takeover that will guarantee the Miami hedge fund to gain total control of it, Tourneuil puts into practice a two-faced scheme not so much to save his bank but to make sure he comes out of the battle as its de facto leader.In our current economic climate, one has to wonder about the wisdom of making the hero an immoral, selfish banker who calls himself a modern Robin Hood, stealing from the poor so the rich may become richer. Tourneuil shows off his affluence without moral pangs for the lives he destroys, and his daily existence is a series of globe-trotting journeys to exotic places like Tokyo and Miami, where he hangs out at luxurious parties with models. He cheats on his wife (Natacha Régnier), rapes a fashion model (Liya Kebede), and belittles the optimism of one of his employees (Céline Sallette) not long after he had made her believe he shared her moral values. Add to Tourneuil's loathsome personality and actions Elmaleh's cold stare and stony facial expressions, and you have a protagonist who is only the hero because the villains, the predatory Miami bankers, are much worse. Elmaleh is so bland one presumes if has to be part of the acting. Perhaps it's Costa-Gavras' intention to totally dehumanize the banking class. Be as it may, Elmaleh comes off as a poor man's Alan Delon, no emotion in his icy blue eyes, but no charisma either.The vicious, ambiguous Tourneuil is in the vein of Costa-Gavras' previous anti-hero from The Axe. In this movie an upper-middle class executive is fired during his company's downsizing. After two years unemployed, he starts killing his competitors for job vacancies. It's a lovely dark comedy that constantly asks the viewer why he should care about this ruthless bastard getting a job when there are millions of better people with worse lives in the same desperate situation. I think perhaps it's because we don't care about poor people anymore. Decades ago – I mean the turbulent and hopeful sixties and seventies – people believed in class war, people even had had and though the world could be made a better place. But we live in an age when the media vehemently say class war does not exist, and instead scares us into thinking the world is a cesspit that will remain a cesspit because we're too insignificant to make a difference. And perhaps they're right. So in this atomised environment, the poor are poor because they want to not because of circumstances beyond their power, we are frequently told. And although in the past one could feel sympathy for them, nowadays we feel disgusted by them. We don't like poor people, we don't want to see them, we don't want to think about them. We admire the rich, the famous, the powerful, we want to be them. So instead of wanting to make the viewer feel sad about the wretched, when that shtick doesn't work anymore in our selfish era, Costa-Gavras shows how he thinks the rich think and live, and then asks, "Are these your modern heroes, are these the people you want to be? Are you really capable of rooting for these scumbags?" The message is interesting, but the actual execution lacks merit and sounds too preachy to seduce any viewer who reasonably doesn't like to be lectured without a good dose of entertainment to wash it down. The characters' motivations are frequently sketchy, many characters are one-dimensional, and the dialogue is peppered with too many corny aphorisms that lack the depth the screenwriters mistakenly think they have.In 1969 Z, a fast-paced thriller about the investigation into the murder of a left-wing Greek candidate, won two Academy awards, was a worldwide success and catapulted the director into stardom. In the seventies, working with screenwriters Jorge Semprún and Franco Solinas, he made several good movies: The Confession, State of Siege, Special Section. Each showcased his knack for exciting montages, clever humour, polemical topics and entertaining story lines, and although they never met with Z's success they were at least every bit as watchable. But starting in the eighties his career started decaying, his movies losing their panache and becoming bland vehicles to vent his moral and social outrage. The fury started compromising the artistry. The world today isn't very different than the world of the young filmmaker who made Z and State of Siege. But I think it's time for a new generation of politically-committed filmmakers to bear the torch, with Costa-Gavras's fierce passion but also the skills he displayed decades ago. Then we can have intelligent and relevant political cinema again. If art has the power to change the world, and I believe it has that power, it must be an art of a greater aesthetic value than Le Capital.

Since four years now and the beginning of the world wide economic crisis, this kind of films emerges from nearly everywhere. This movies is not an exception. It describes the ruthless, fierce, cruel and greedy financial world - I would say underworld. Many people have said this is too much in caricature, full of clichés. Yes I agree with that, but it's very realistic. And so cynical too. As I have rarely seen before. Costa Gavras tries so hard to disgust the audience, make the viewers puke all over the joint in watching this feature. What is the most interesting, is that the lead is actually a disgusting hero. I have never seen a hero described in such a way. Never in a life time watching films. I Love this. But that doesn't make it a great film. Only surprising about this detail. That's all. I prefer it to WALL STREET films. Although it's not better.Worth the look. No more.