This is one of director Claude Chabrol's final film projects. It stars Isabel Huppert as a dogged French magistrate investigating corporate corruption. Through the course of the film, despite threats and pressure from her superior, she keeps pushing and pushing and pushing-- barely sleeping, neglecting her husband and doing nothing but work on this complex case of corruption. As for the baddies, they keep thinking that she can't be THAT determined...but she certainly is.I really thought this was a fascinating topic and the film was well made. So why did I only give it a 6? Well, the film just ended...very abruptly and with no real resolution. It felt like a HUGE disappointment and left me feeling confused and unfulfilled. It's a shame as Huppert was excellent and the film really kept my attention...

The English title of this one could perhaps give the erroneous impression of being a black comedy when actually it turns out to be a combination of financial thriller and family drama. This could in itself constitute a disappointment for discriminating viewers but, a minor work though it is, I cannot say I was bored during the film's nearly two-hour running-time.Constituting the seventh collaboration between director Chabrol and his female star Isabelle Huppert since 1978's VIOLETTE NOZIERE, the film boasts another fine turn from the formidable French actress as a dreaded Judge dubbed "The Piranha" investigating a convoluted series of financial transactions involving various international conglomerates. Huppert's first 'victim' is allergy-ridden businessman Francois Berleand, later a celebrity middle-man and even a supposed suitor of Huppert's. Her uncompromising stand soon sees her treading on big-league toes and she is given a couple of promotions (and an initially antagonistic female partner) to throw her off the scent of the misappropriated funds.Back home, Huppert's family life is no bed of roses, either: her husband is often relegated to the sidelines not just by her all-important workload but also by his own charismatic live-in nephew (played by the director's own son, Thomas). To top it all off, Huppert's offices are broken into, she has a traffic accident and is briefly hospitalized, Huppert quits her husband who subsequently leaps (albeit not fatally) out of the window and Huppert's loyal secretary is, at the very end of the film, discovered to have been the mole all along! While the narrative may seem busy enough from this synopsis, the film's talky nature makes its pace a fairly slow one; however, as I already intimated earlier on, Chabrol's unwavering professionalism and consummate elegance and the solid performances on display ensure the viewer's interest in the proceedings despite the possibly unappealing milieu of financial intrigue.

In this Idiot Nation of ours, corruption (on a global scale) is taken for granted. The GOBs (Good Old Boys, formerly known as the Grand Old Party) have raped and pillaged this country for three decades, now- and yet, not one single filmmaker (aside from a couple of documentary movie makers) has has the guts to step up and say anything about it. (John Carpenter and George Romero have given us Reaganvilles and theocracies- in THEY LIVE and ESCAPE FROM L.A.- and war between the Haves and the Have-nots- LAND OF THE DEAD- but where are the others? If there's anyone else doing anything even remotely in tune with Our Times, they're flying well under the radar.) "Morphine doesn't help," Claude Chabrol says in one interview: "It just stops the pain." It's eight o'clock in the morning, folks- time to wake up.

Jan 7, 2007 In Comedy of Power, Isabelle Huppert plays Jeanne Charmant-Killman, a driven French investigating judge who is committed to rooting out systemic corporate corruption and bribery. As a judge and a woman, she finds herself lined up against entrenched old-boy attitudes and an acceptance of corporate corruption shared by most of the powerful older male characters including those in a position to influence her career. Comedy of Power asks whether a woman in a position of power and influence can be effective and also have a life. Huppert is superb as the skinny workaholic Charmant-Killman (is this last name an intentional pun, I wonder). She has no time to eat or sleep, little or no empathy or tendresse and no time for her husband. It is difficult to decide where Chabrol comes out on the question of whether she is admirable for her determination and courage or despicable for her ambition and callousness. Perhaps, in just posing the question in such stark terms, Chabrol ultimately displays his own prejudice. At the same time that Comedy of Power examines these somewhat cerebral questions, it also manages to keep us on the edge of our seat (not on a Hitchcockian level, but enough to make us flinch when the doorbell rings).All in all, this was a very good movie.