Le Capital (The Capital) (French)

“Money is a dog that doesn't need to be patted. Throw a ball again and again and it will keep fetching it back” is what Marc Tourneuil (Gad Elmaleh) declares at the beginning of this financial drama by acclaimed director Costa Gravas.  I could not get around to watching the special screening of “Z” on the last day. But Le Capital was not a bad way to start of my experience with Gravas.

Marc Tourneuil is a senior executive with a large, French Bank called Phoenix Bank in France.  He is the bank’s CEO in waiting and when the incumbent CEO passes away without warning, he is all but unanimously selected as his replacement.  Tourneuil has been known to be a super ambitious executive willing to go to great lengths to court success.

Dittmar Rigule (Gabriel Byrne) is the principal partner of an American Hedge Fund that is heavily invested into Phoenix Bank.  Dittmar uses Touneuil’s ambitious nature to his advantage by providing the right temptations to Marc at the right times.  The temptations range from a monetary nature to that of a super model – Nassim (Liya Kebede) whose sole intent is to keep Marc wanting more.

Based on the Stéphane Osmont  novel, Le Capital has an extremely complex plot and it is advisable that everyone who watches the movie pays very careful attention to the dialogue.  The movie shuttles between French and English. Karim Boukercha, Gravas and Jean-Claude Grumberg have ensured a liberal use of metaphors that you may or may not get.  So keep your ears and eyes (to read) open all the time.

The movie has some really solid performances especially from Elmaleh who gets the ambition and desperation of a high flying executive to the screen quite well.  He could have done with a little more intensity of course but what you see is just about there.  Gabriel Byrne is as always quite composed and delivers the role of the greedy hedge fund executive very effectively.

If anything, the role of the support cast is probably quite subdued in the overall scheme of things.  There is little role that anyone else has to play – and I mean in terms of screen time – other than Byrne and Elmaleh.  In fact, at a point of time, you would think that the character of Nassim has more emphasis than the others.

Overall, not a bad way to start my Gravas experience, but I had probably expected something more intense and hard hitting than what I saw.  I assume, this was not Gravas’s best piece of work especially because he has been around for nearly 40 years and this was his 18^th feature.  I will definitely be back for more.  And I hope it will only be better.  7 on 10.

Watch the trailer on http://www.imdb.com/video/user/vi414033945/?ref_=tt_ov_vi