The Last Mitterrand Details

The Question Remains

Mitterand's political career spanned 50 years. He ruled France longer than anyone since Napoleon III and retired to mixed notices but without bloodshed. He cemented the post-war Franco-German alliance, was intrigued by Margaret Thatcher, stood alongside Queen Elizabeth at the opening of the Channel Tunnel and pushed the Communists into the margins of the French left.

We find him enjoying the last days of power in the company of a young journalist who is writing his last testament. Both parts are well played, Mitterand outstandingly so. The plot revolves around their cat-and-mouse game and the young man's personal frustrations, which Mitterand enjoys hearing about.

The key question soon emerges. What was the truth of Mitterand's involvement with Petain's Vichy regime which collaborated with Hitler, sent French Jews to the concentration camps and waited in vain for a British defeat? Did Mitterand, who held a Vichy decoration, join the Resistance as an act of patriotic courage or calculated expediency? Everything rests on the precise timing of his transferred loyalty but the evidence is contradictory. Mitterand's examiner persists and comes close to a formula he thinks the old man might accept on his death bed, only to be told to 'run along'. The question remains.

Mitterand is portrayed in the final stages of his illness, still mobile, mentally alert and counting the days he has set to reach his target before stoically dying of prostate cancer. He scoffs gently at the illusions of youth, refuses to enlighten his interrogator and muses on the secrets of a country that keeps them well. Flying above the French countryside, he ponders its dominant colour. It is, he declares, gray - a colour that offers for him all the variations anyone can want. Watch this film and decide if you agree.

[Highly rated reviewer]

Absorbing and touching

A surprisingly accessible portrait of the long-serving French prime minister, playful to the end, occasionally mischevious, sometimes downright cruel. No previous knowledge of French politics required, except perhaps the country's ambivalent relationship with the Vichy period, the wartime puppet government that seemed to taint everyone in some way, Mitterand included. Nice political parallels in the young biographer's own life, in a 1980s France that is just beginning to break out of a socialist straitjacket. No startling revelations but a lot of insight along the way, and nice performances all round