robinski34 Quai D'Orsay (retitled The French Minister for some markets) is a likable and highly amusing French political farce from director Bertrand Tavernier, perhaps best known for 'Round Midnight. Quai D'Orsay presents the shenanigans within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with a wonderfully straight face, while delivering laugh-out-loud moments by the portfolio-ful. Thierry Lhermitte's turn as Minister Alexandre Taillard de Worms is delightfully effective, every bombastic centimetre the Gallic Jim Hacker, with no sense of the events around him, yet, unlike Hacker, he is brimful of arrogant confidence in the face of every disaster. His foil is not a scheming Parisienne Sir Humphrey, but his long suffering chief of staff Claude Maupas, excellently portrayed by Niels Arestrup. Enter Raphaël Personnaz as the youthful and politically naive Arthur Vlaminkck, then sit back and chortle as young Arthur learns the workings of the ministry the hard way, doing his best to manoeuvre through the eccentricities of the minister's characterful staff. Quai D'Orsay is an enjoyable film with plenty of smiles and laughs, yet at almost two hours, it does begin to feel a bit baggy after the first half, still well worth seeing however.

abisio Satire as was defined in old Greek plays; was the art to just exaggerate reality and became a critic in itself. You do not need to mock it, or change. Reality is fine in itself.Quai d' Orsay (or The French Minister ) is the tale of guy who has to make the French Foreign Affairs Minister's speech.The interesting thing about the movie; is that it never loss focus on where it is going. The guy is just an accessory; the important thing is the absurdity of political events, of Ministers that are only actors and the people behind the scenes that really move everything. Acting are superb. Niels Arestrup gives an Oscar or Cesar deserving performance as the Chief of Staff; the guy that really moves the wires. Thierry Lhermitte as the egomaniac intellectual Minister is equally outstanding.Let's hope this movie gets a proper release and find a public; because i t is perhaps the best French comedy of the year.

Joe Yanick Taking a break from the world of drama, and coming fresh off a 16th century period piece, Bertrand Tavernier tests his hand in the world of comedy. "The French Minister", adapted from the comic book "Quai d'Orsay", is a whimsical political satire, which never loses sight of its realist tendencies. A transparent parody of the US-Iraq conflict, substituting Iraq for the fictional country of Lousdemistan, "The French Minister" depicts the life of Arthur Vlaminck, the freshly hired speech writer for the French minister Alexandre Taillard de Worms. Throughout the film Arthur is consistently hurled through a sea of endless rewrites and bureaucratic minutia, all the while, balancing the verbose personalities of the diplomats with whom he is forced to work with.The film is an absolute pleasurable viewing experience that places the viewer in rapid succession of loosely connected vignettes. Lacking the typical story structure, the film rather invites the viewer into the world of diplomacy and bureaucracy, in a fashion that seems more circular than linear. One of Tavernier's strengths throughout the film is his ability to match the spaces in which the characters reside to the signification of their position in the bureaucratic machine. The circular nature of the narrative, and the spatial and temporal order Tavernier utilizes, comments of the ineffective, even comic, nature of bureaucracy.Contradiction and repetition form the basis for the film's humor, as Arthur is continually shuffled from room to room; failing to be able to distinguish advice from deception. Despite the clear notion that Arthur represents the film's main character, he remains vacant for large sequences. Further, in many of the scenes where Arthur and Alexendre appear together, Arthur's presence is completely dominated by the aura of Alexandre, allowing the viewer to disregard Arthur altogether. Similar to style of the great French filmmaker Jean Renoir, the film's absence of a strong central figure allows for the stronger analysis of a series of characters, each representing a larger part of society. In this manner, the audience is not forced into the psychology of any one character, but allowed to view all of the characters from a distanced space.Thierry Lhermitte's portrayal of Alexandre, paired with Tavernier's visual treatment, fashions a dynamic and dominating character. His narcissistic and pretentious attributes are equally matched by charisma and charm. Lhermitte's performance performs a similar overwhelming task on the audience, as his character does on Arthur. Likewise, through Tavernier's added elements of comic heightening, while farcical, remain grounded at all times in realism. Depicted as moving with such intensity that his entrances consistently cause stacks of paper to explode into a whirlwind of chaos, obsessing over highlighters to a point of absolute comic absurdity, and neurotically referring to his texts, Llhermitte's character is rife with humor.As a testament to the writing, the film requires no deep knowledge of the political workings of government, nor does it fail to seem applicable to US notions of government. Despite its intimate relation to French culture and politics, the film's comedy is universal. Requiring from the viewer only their attention span, "The French Minister" performs the rest of the work. Travernier's film is a humorous and imaginative romp just waiting to be discovered.Originally published via StageBuddy by Joe Yanick http://stagebuddy.com/film-TV/review-french-minister/

corrosion-2 Quai d'Orsay is based on a comic book by Abel Lanzac (pseudonym for Antonin Baudry) who worked at the French Foreign Ministry (known colloquially as Quai d'Orsay, after its location in Paris) as former foreign minister Dominique de Villepin's speech writer for several years.In the film we have Arthur (Raphaël Personnaz) , a young speech writer for foreign minister Alexandre de Worms (played with relish by Thierry Lhermitte) who suffers from the minister's continuous barrage of shallow slogans instead of helpful directives. Tavernier has portrayed de Worms as a pretentious, shallow person with few redeeming features who appears to spend all his working hours highlighting quotations by his favorite authors with yellow highlighters. The film itself is a fast moving and reasonably funny farce focusing on the minister's helplessness in encounters at the UN, lunch with a Nobel Laurette, managing crisis at home (where he is ever reliant on the old hand Claude (played by the veteran actor Niels Arestrup) ad so on.Quai d'Orsay passes the time quite pleasingly mainly thanks to fine acting and brisk direction but is not a high point in Bertrand Tavernier's body of work.