I... for Icarus

A head of state is assassinated. The official commission pins it on a single gunman; the prosecutor Henri Volney refuses to sign the report and opens his own inquiry. The trail leads not to individuals but to the responsibility of a system. The film is not interested in whose work the killing was. It is interested in obedience: at its centre is a long sequence showing an experiment conducted at a university, where participants believe they are giving electric shocks to another person on the instruction of an authority figure, and most of them continue. This is the Milgram experiment, carried out at Yale, moved into the film, with the university renamed. The form belongs to the seventies conspiracy thriller: files, wiretaps, corridors, and cold direction. Its starting point is plain: the Kennedy assassination and the Warren Commission report. Henri Verneuil did not relocate the case to France but to an unnamed country, so the subject stops being one incident and becomes a method. Yves Montand plays the prosecutor. Who it is for: viewers drawn to political conspiracy thrillers and to the argument about obedience to authority. Who it is not for: anyone who wants pace. The film is long, explanatory and at times close to lecturing.