The political life of Nicolas Sarkozy is the basis of "The Conquest", a fictional work that examines the events in his life, before and after becoming France's president. There is a disclaimer as the film opens in which a warning informs the viewer this clearly an attempt to tell the story, not exactly what happened in real life.Nicolas Sarkozy, an ambitious man, was tapped by Jacques Chirac to be his Interior minister. At the time, M. Chirac had no intention of running again. He nurtured Nicolas, whom he found to be an astute politician with charisma and chutzpah, enough to capture the voting public's imagination. Sarkozy had a formidable opponent in Dominic Villepin, who had ambitions of his own. The story deals with the intrigues and obstacles surrounding these professional politicians.The story also zeroes in Nicolas relation with his then wife, Cecilia, an intelligent woman who besides being Mrs. Sarkozy, was his adviser. It becomes imminent the deteriorating relationship between Nicolas and Cecilia. They eventually divorced. The political animal Nicolas Sarkozy was, lost much more than Cecilia in the process.Xavier Durringer directs "The Conquest" more as a farce than a real portrayal of the man. There are glimpses throughout the story of his power and prominence in the French political life, but ultimately, the film feels empty as it tries to entertain rather than examine in depth the issues that brought M. Sarkozy to power.The director achieves a coup in the casting of the main roles. Denis Podalydes reminds us of Nicolas Sarkozy's posture doing an excellent impersonation of the subject of the picture. Bernard LeCoq is perfect as Jacques Chirac, the powerful figure in French political life. Samuel Labarthe bears an uncanny resemblance to Dominic Villepin and Florence Pernel does wonders as Cecilia.

The Conquest has exceptional acting, a brutally honest script, no attempt to sweeten a power-monger from what he/she is. An top-notch case study in what the ultimate "Type A" personalities (presidential candidates) are like, Durringer succeeds with The Conquest where Stone failed with Nixon and W by over-sentimentalizing the ruthless, power-hungry nature of their subjects by emphasizing an altruism that's not really there. The fact that its subject matter may not be immediately familiar shouldn't deter you from watching the movie, as the characters are well-acted enough you'll be entertained anyway. Will you sympathize with Podalydes' version of Sarkozy? At times, as his character isn't a clear-cut hero or villain but a number of shades of gray in this docudrama-like approach that is much different than Brolin's version of W. The Conquest is the best political drama I've seen in years. I wish that it went on to cover Sarkozy's courtship of Carla Bruni, but I suppose that could make a good sequel.

The premise - not of the film itself, but let's say what surrounds it, its instance as it came to be - is interesting, namely, the depiction of a nation's President in his/her rise to power and while he/she still is in power; what titillates in such a premise is I think the promise that we truly live in democratic times and that means times that can pull off the apparition of such a film sincerely, exposing the machinations and the weaknesses of a leader, as some kind of demonstration in the making that turns spectacle into some kind of self-witnessing democracy in the making.May I never write that sentence again.What is so wrong with it? It suffers from plausibility of the politically correct kind, of a stupid, biased kind. Just take some steps back and reconsider the film you saw: would you really think having seen it that the film is a demonstration, or a proof that we live in democratic times? Let's begin from the soundtrack that snaps right away: the references to Rota ground the film in Fellini territory, and so by cultural allusion we wonder if this wouldn't be more properly employed in Berlusconi's case - or is it that Berlusconi is in a way the future of - European at least - leadership, and so Sarkozy's vulgarity is a peripheral phenomenon to the standard shamelessness of Berlusconi as stand-in for the Rota/Fellini circus? But even this doubly misfires, I am afraid; I think to have a film critical of a head of state while still in power - truly, politically critical - could be the name of utopia itself, and doubly so: that means on the one hand practically it would never purely be so for at least at some point it would have to invent and so enter the ideological imagination of the script-writer (when Mrs. Almost-Ex-Sarkozy gratuitously cried towards the end I wished I had never entered the mind of this particular script-writer), or, in order to remember early 20th century propaganda frames, such a film would be a redundancy.Yet we live in biased more than propaganda times: do we need radio and press and media exposition - if we have followed the political climate and state in France during the time - turned into a semi-fictionalized account? Does this not mistake, and it is a major mistake, information for political stance, which is another name for politicizing melodrama? But maybe we are still in a frame of mind not far from the one Jean Baudrillard exposed back in the 90's when Cicciolina (remember?) was elected in the Italian Parliament: it was literally for laughs, as a face-off of politics into female impersonation.For what we have in the film are impersonators, and not actors. Perhaps there is a charm to it, watch your favorite buffoons played by some impersonators with the occasional poignant truism in their mouths here and there. But I do not want my genuine buffoon Sarkozy played - sorry, impersonated by another buffoon and spoil my male-bonding fun: and this is the crux of the matter for me: instead of just plainly turning a misconception into maybe a bad film, more importantly it turns a misconception into bad democracy anchored into macho innuendo.I admit it was a bit harder for me to digest, since the spice added to my watching experience was the remembrance of watching Podalydes as Jean-Paul Sartre some years back in a french miniseries: he was truly bad, of the same brand of badness as here, that is over-reacting the body language and confounding the demarcation between it and bodily tics, as if attacking the whole thing totally from outside, and offering us the ludicrous ruin of a theatrical alphabet; think of Louis de Funes instead as what a truly ingenious confusion of the above categories would mean each time he exploded bodily coordinates, unless one conceives Podalydes' over-reacting as the allegory of the unhappy Left: the invasion of the body snatchers into the liberal body that mistakes bodily tics for politics!Do not think of these asides irrelevant to the film - that is its ideology: they make all the more palpable the lack of political and aesthetic, cinematic decisions: to put it bluntly, if this film has some kind of political novelty - and is not as I believe something re-appropriated if not shamelessly pushed around by the liberal consensus - then it has to be supplemented by a film surrounding the rise to life of the Bruni-Sarkozy child, since it is the first time a President becomes father while in office! That would give us the glimpse to the hotness of the first lady we have so shamelessly and programmatically been declined: imagine Podalydes in seizure as he takes a baby from Laetitia Casta's bosom.May we never have to see such a film.

I will be straight. I find this feature absolutely exquisite. I have never seen a film like this before, about a president still in action with so much resemblance between the characters and the actual people. Everything is very close to the reality here: faces, talking, manners, every thing. We can watch here the greedy, ambitious, ruthless means Sarkozy uses to succeed in power. He is very well described in this movie, of which we already know the ending. Still now. But no one can predict how the future, in 2012, will be like for the midget president. It's not a masterpiece, just watch it as entertainment. You won't see another film like this before a long time. But I hope to be wrong.A real must.