A Thousand Billion Dollars

A journalist investigates why a French industrialist suddenly sold his company. The trail leads to an American multinational. His paper backs the story at first, then the pressure arrives; his sources go quiet, files about his past surface and his own paper leaves him alone. The subject is not corruption but how a story is stopped. The company does not threaten the journalist; it discredits him, which works better. The film shows that mechanism step by step. The form is dry and dense with information. Meeting rooms, archives, phone calls. There is no action; the tension comes from reading documents and from doors closing. It has a particular importance for its moment: the power of multinationals over politics was a subject French cinema had only recently begun to treat in 1982, and this film became one of the best-known examples of that argument. Patrick Dewaere plays the journalist. He died a few months after the film's release, at thirty-five, and this is among his last works; the performance is remembered separately now. Henri Verneuil directs. Michel Auclair and Caroline Cellier are in the cast. Who it is for: viewers who like journalism thrillers and eighties French political cinema. Who it is not for: anyone expecting movement; the film is almost entirely conversation.