Costa-Gavras’ latest film, Capital, opens with a benign scene of men playing golf, interrupted first by the collapse of one of the players, and then quickly thereafter by a fourth-wall-breaking bit of dialogue from the film’s malignantly ambitious protagonist, Marc Tourneuil (Gad Elmaleh). In that moment, as he coolly explains why it’s significant to the coming story—the fallen golfer is the leader of growth-minded Parisian institution Phenix Bank, and Tourneuil will soon find himself thrown into the position of acting CEO—we catch a first glimpse of the character’s inner life, a shady realm that displays itself in fits and starts, but always retreats behind a glass divide. Elmaleh, whose disconcerting blue gaze normally serves his work as a stand-up comedian (he did an episode of Jerry Seinfeld’s web series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, weirdly enough) plays Tourneuil with an impassive distance, and just a hint of menace.
Thrust in front of the board, complete with a sinister trio who want to “bury the pooch with his master,” Tourneuil immediately complicates their plans. They want a temporary figurehead who will step down when he outgrows his usefulness. Tourneuil, on the other hand, intends to go over their heads into dealings with a group of American investors who can take Phenix from a French to a global power.
Costa-Gavras is still best known in the United States for his 1969 thriller Z, a film that clouded its tense procedural structure with inflammatory politics. (A disclaimer that precedes the film famously reads: “Any resemblance to real events, to persons living or dead, is not accidental. It is DELIBERATE.”) With Capital, the director creates a drama that is both larger in scope and less immediate. The two films share a sense of biased narration, exhibited in Capital by an irregular flirtation with that fourth wall, alienating moments of slow motion, and a series of scenes in which Tourneuil breaks with reality to lash out violently at his in-laws and work colleagues. Tourneuil’s bouts of fantasy at first introduce the possibility that he is merely a hard-working guy being strangled by his “company man” status, but as the film progresses his restraint seems like a calculation, a characteristic that gives his rudderless pursuit of domination a sense of constancy. As he becomes embroiled in massive lay-offs and scandalous financial dealings, Tourneuil moves quickly from put-upon stooge to active aggressor.
Another wealth-obsessed film from this fall, the disastrous Runner Runner, depicted the heady world of online money exchange in a dead-eyed whirlwind of scantily clad women, champagne-filled private parties (at least one boasting an appearance from mouse-eared EDM figurehead, Deadmaus), and giggling villainy—in one scene, a character remarks that the spectacle is “everything you ever thought you wanted when you were thirteen.” Capital, though concerned with some of the same themes (greed, the potential impurity of invisible monetary transactions) exists in an entirely different world. Here, luxury is embedded in a routine, monochrome set of goods—designer suits, beautiful scarves, the pallid, expensive-looking offices in which Tourneuil visits his remotely located employees. Tourneuil treats these pedestrian signifiers as a vaguely crass sideshow circling the main event: the acquisition of power.