Plot summary
He, Yves Dorget, is a major reporter in a daily newspaper. She, Catherine Carré, is a TV news anchor. They had a love affair together, when she was a young beginner journalist, but her ambition and her desire to arrive had separated them. Today, the news brings them back together: he is taken as a hostage and then released by a thug on the run, a thief but not a killer. She holds a cassette proving the compromise of the Prime Minister in a political assassination. The two cases overlap. The news item joins the underside of politics. How will both react? For him, his professional conscience going hand in hand with his rigorous morality, there is only one truth that we owe to the public. For her, the path to choose is more difficult, divided between rediscovered love, her demand for professional integrity and - the seduction of an ambiguous solution. Who can truly secure the "4th Power"?
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Power failure
This fourth power is none other than the medias : Catherine Carré represents the television news,a nice place where "you just stand aside and look" whereas her ex-lover ,Yves Dorget , represents the press where you can write anything you want and you "are fighting a constant struggle ".
A prime minister is involved in the murder of an opponent of a Third World country government ;France (and himself)had a stake in a deal :2 power plants were to be built in the country .
In the past ,André Cayatte and Yves Boisset used to broach this kind of story :their works were heavily demonstrative,but they were often efficient ;Serge Leroy showed in the past he could treat such burning subjects ,as his brilliant " La Traque" shows .
Unfortunately,Françoise Giroud 's screenplay is oversimplified ,you can read through it ;it accumulates caricatures (the TV chief executive ,played by a wasted Brialy,Dorget's editor) clichés (the estranged couple whose adventures bind them together again...for a while) ,and egregious gaffes ( the reporters meeting , the restaurant owner at the beck and call of her famous guest).
The only asset of this heavy-handed political movie is its principals :both Philippe Noiret and Nicole Garcia try their best to give their characters some substance ;and given the limitations they were working under, they are to be praised .