Written for RAF News July 2017

The opening of Scribe might seem like a joke, an office-worker is told by his superior that he needs a file ready for morning – cue a montage of paperwork and filing but cut together as though it were an espionage thriller. The strangest thing about this is: it works.

François Cluzet (The Intouchables) is stressed-out filer Mr Duval, knocking back whiskey between staples in this introduction. Two years later he is on the wagon and off the payroll, looking for work to distract him from his addiction.

Interviewed by the mysterious Clément (Denis Podalydès) for a private security firm, he is asked about the gap in his employment and his political standing. The work, it turns out, is to transcribe conversations from tapped phones, requiring the utmost discretion. Clément apparently has a visual memory and distrusts digital technology and so requires someone to type out every word on a typewriter and without mistakes.

Offered a decent salary Duval accepts the job but the confidential nature is stressed to the point of suspicion. Each day he must enter an apartment, listen to tapes and type up what he hears, leaving the pages to be collected without ever having contact with anyone. With no friends or family apart from his AA group, Duval is a loner, so when he eventually hears a phone-call that is disturbing, he has no-one to turn to.

In fact a lot of the scenes take place in large locations with only Duval or one other, from his apartment to a conference room or even a stadium. This could be a thematic motif of a small fish in a big pond, isolated from the world around, or maybe just a way to save on extras. Either way it is clear from the off that things are not going to turn out well. The original score sounds a lot like a muted Phillip Glass with a circus kind of mania about it – this is a slippery slope into a dark political underworld.

There are obvious touches of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation but the analogue tapes and reels have been smoothed out and the film has its own clear and clean style. What is so impressive is how the shots of Duval typing alone are made to be engaging, exciting almost. It is when the plot inevitably thickens that it also becomes forgettable, as the story itself is unconvincing and of little interest in the end.