Carbone

A crime film set in France. Antoine Roca runs a metal recycling business. It is going badly and the debts have piled up. His father-in-law presses him. He is a big man in the trade and does not think much of his son-in-law. Antoine looks for a way. A lawyer tells him something. Carbon emission quotas are bought and sold in Europe and there is a hole in that trade. Value added tax. When a quota is bought in one country and sold in another the tax is collected from the state and not paid. The transaction looks legal. The tax is not paid and the company is shut down. From there the film is a story of setting up. Antoine opens front companies. He has a partner. Elias is an old acquaintance and brings in people from the neighbourhood. The money comes fast. Millions a day. Then the trouble starts. A group from Marseille comes in. They want the same trade and offer a partnership. When Antoine refuses the threats come. At the same time the state notices. Tax inspectors and police open a file. What the narrative is interested in is not fraud but scale: its idea is that a business begun by exploiting a loophole gets away from him in a short time and that nobody can stop it. The violence enters in the second half and is hard. Antoine loses his family. His wife and child are under threat. The ending is entirely dark. The events are real. The tax fraud carried out through carbon quotas in Europe cost France billions of euros and the case ran for years. The narrative changes the names and adds invention. Olivier Marchal was once a policeman and uses that in his films. The images are dark and cold. Benoît Magimel, Laura Smet, Gringe and Idir Chender are in the cast. Who it is for: anyone who likes French crime cinema and films based on real events. Who it is not for: anyone who dislikes financial detail; the narrative explains a mechanism in its first half hour and that section is dense.