A multi-national group of translators are assembled to work on a
secretive novel, but one of them appears to be a blackmailer.
Review by
Eric Hillis
Starring: Régis Roinsard
Directing: ALex Lawther, Lambert Wilson, Olga
Kurylenko, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Riccardo Scamarcio, Frédéric Chau, Patrick Bauchau
It's almost a decade since Régis Roinsard's directorial debut
Populaire, a breezily adorable love letter to the Technicolor comedies of 1950s
Hollywood. That movie revolved around the world of speed-typing, with
lots of fetishised shots and montages of metal keys being struck by
well-manicured nails. In his second feature,
The Translators, it's not the keys that Roinsard is fetishising, but rather the words
their strokes create. This Agatha Christie inspired
whodunit-and-how-did-they-dunnit is a salute to the craft of
storytelling with a very French anti-capitalist message about how art
should belong to the people.
Having acquired the coveted third novel of 'Dedalus', a global
best-selling series written by secretive author Oscar Brach, sinister
publisher Eric Angstrom (Lambert Wilson) assembles a crack team
of multi-national translators in a fortified bunker and sets them to
work converting the novel into their own languages. Some, like sultry
Russian Katerina (Olga Kurylenko) and young English tyke Alex (Alex Lawther) are obsessive fans of Brach's work. Others, like grouchy Greek
Marxist Konstantinos (Manolis Mavromatakis), consider it trash
barely worth wrapping their fish and chips in. But most just view it as
another paying job.
When Angstrom receives an anonymous email from a blackmailer claiming
to have acquired the text of the novel, which they will release online
if they don't receive a hefty ransom, he assumes the email has come from
someone in the bunker. The suspects are interrogated and their rooms
searched, but Angstrom comes up empty. With the manuscript having never
left the bunker, Angstrom conducts an increasingly aggressive
investigation to figure out who is responsible, causing the translators
to turn on one another.
Roinsard's mystery gradually evolves out of the bunker, jumping
backwards and forwards in time as it teases details of what exactly is
afoot here. These flash forwards and flashbacks are a welcome break from
the claustrophobic setting of the bunker, and also allow Roinsard to
pull off the occasional high tempo set-piece, like a thrilling homage to
The French Connection that sees characters chasing a
subway train as they attempt to pull off a rapid heist of sorts.
Such diversions are all too rare however, and
The Translators gets a little too bogged down in
unspooling its complicated plot through entire scenes that serve as
exposition dumps. You know how every
Murder She Wrote episode ended with Jessica Fletcher
explaining in a flashback how that week's murder was committed, and by
whom? Well The Translators gives us more than few of these
scenes, and after initially sucking us in with what feels like a slick
Gallic take on Ocean's 11, Roinsard ends up testing our patience towards the climax as the
gradually unveiled plot fails to stand up to too much logical
scrutiny.
