An author is at a low point in his life : he pines for his ex, his money is running out and he has lost the fire in his belly. He is approached by an older man with a mysterious background who asks him to write a book, to wit a clarion call to revolutionary action. The book is meant as a weapon in a shadowy war between politicians. When the writer agrees, he discovers that he has bitten off more than he can chew.

It's an interesting premise, but the movie doesn't do much with it. The main problem is that the movie finds it very, very difficult to build suspense. In the hands of, say, a Polanski or a Hitchcock this could have been a thrilling, exciting, disquieting ride, but now : meh.

On the other hand there are a few nice sketches of a particular intellectual environment : that of the various heirs of the Leftist "élan" of the sixties and seventies. (Watch the movie and you can smell environmentally responsible potato and cabbage soup prepared by a commune.) There are also a number of valid observations on politics and democracy - or rather, on politics and the lack of democracy - but again, the movie doesn't do much with these ideas, it all peters out in a sad fashion.

This movie "Le Grand Jeu" is an interesting labyrinth in the french world of political and administrative manipulation. But the script is not really clear enough, it doesn't reach the ultimate highlights of Costa-Gavras or André Cayatte. Nicolas Meriser gets lost in his subject without taking off. But it's getting better than his short movies, like "la République" or "Agit Pop" which are ridiculous in their demonstration with absolutely no conviction. In these three movies I've seen, settings and photography are rather poor.

It's just as well you can't copyright a title otherwise Nicholas Pariser might find himself in very deep s**t indeed. Jacques Feyder made the definitive Le Grand Jeu back in the day - the early thirties if anybody asks you - and whilst Pariser is frying a very different kettle of fish vastly inferior to the pate de fois served up by Feyder he does 'borrow' the central idea of a protagonist fleeing his natural habitat in the opening reel and the 'plot' developing in an alien (to the protagonist) locale. Given the world we are now obliged to live in it is inevitable that filmmakers will begin to explore extremist groups in depth or, as here, in shallow. Melville Poupaud, a fortyish writer whose career peaked around fifteen years ago is approached at a casino by Andre Dussollier who suggests Poupaud might like to do a book on a dodgy political figure. Before you can say Jeremy Corbyn he finds himself on the run and lying low in a sort of French kibbutz of left-wing rabble rousers where, against his common sense, he falls for an attractive dissident. There you have it. I watched it for Andre Dussollier and so long as he was on screen I wasn't disappointed. Alas, there are stretches of time when he is not on screen.