81/100

Surreal opening is a masterstroke, as the rest of the film is almost obsessively grounded in reality; even when something spectacular unexpectedly happens about 2/3 of the way in (and what a fucking setpiece that is, out of nowhere!), it's immediately transformed into business as usual. Movies about gradual corruption/disillusionment are fairly commonplace, but I've never seen one this methodical and low-key, nor so strangely devoid of cynicism. Gourmet absolutely kills it as the title character—at once an idealist…

So a naked chick walks into an alligator...then we get two hours of French political drama as told through the eyes of the transport ministry.

The film starts strong, with the alligator sequence, then dealing with the fallout of a countryside bus crash with numerous fatalities and while the pace of the dialogue seems to maintain the break-neck speed established early on, unfortunately the intrigue does not.

There are some great sequences smattered throughout the rest of the film (the…

The Minister tells the tale of Bertrand Saint-Jean, Minister of Transport in a France undergoing mass change.
He’s forced to deal with the fallout of a bus crash in the Ardennes which has claimed several lives, while being blind-sided by the Minister of Finance pushing for the privatisation of the country’s rail network in order to keep the Government’s books out of the red – something Saint-Jean is against.
On top of all this, he has a new driver as…