Dir::Jean-Paul Salomé | Cast: Reda Kateb, Bastien Bouillon, Sara Giraudeau | France, Biopic Drama 128′.
Most people have never heard of Jan Bojarski (1913-2003). But the French know him as the “Cezanne of counterfeit money”. And that’s how Jean-Paul Salome choses to portray his subject in this surprising biopic that traces the career of one of France’s most legendary swindlers, starting out as an engineer, he was possessed with creative mind and skill at the drawing board that would certainly serve him well, for a while.
It all begins in Lyon, during the Occupation. The modest Polish immigrant arrives in France and marries in the wake of the liberation. With a head buzzing with ideas he invents a ballpoint pen and a revolving chair but his foreign name fails to open French (!) doors. So he has a better idea. First as part of a gang operating out of a modest bar, and then going it alone, Jan Bojarski hones his craft in copying banknotes, refining his technique to stay ahead of the bemused ‘Banque de France’.
It will take fourteen years to track down the ‘king’ of forgery and we actually root for him such is Reda Ketab’s sympathetic lead performance. Measured and modest, he’s such a likeable character and we feel for him; cheated on by his flighty wife Suzanne (Sara Giraudeau), let down by his partners in crime, and finally caught by Bastien Bouillon’s vapid detective Commissioner Mattei who is supposed to be driven by obsession but doesn’t give that impression.
Just like the forger himself, Salome crafts his story discreetly (in flashback) with patience and fine attention to detail, a meticulous eye for costumes and framing, and it serves as a fascinating social history of France in the postwar years, known as the ‘Trente Glorieuses’, a France billed as a democratic utopia, but seemingly a far cry from ‘Liberty, Egalite, Fraternite’. Instead the country emerges riddled with racial intolerance, corrupt institutions and a weak Police force.
You could say the modest engineer ends up driven to crime to make a living and he does so from modest lodgings and eventually a modernist detached villa with all the mid-century details. As such Bojarki is almost the hero of the piece, a decent family man keen to support his family, surrounded by characters with feet of clay. Eventually, like most long-term crooks, he tires of keeping his light under a bushel, and that’s when it all ends. Fascinating even if you’re not French.
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