Despite actor Denis Menochet's gravely commanding performance, Alexandre Smia's efficient political procedural feels like the pilot for a TV show titled "Worst Case Scenario." Fictional French President Paul Archambault, as played with gimlet-eyed resolve by Denis Menochet in Alexandre Smia‘s “Jupiter” is, we’re cued to believe, a good man. Thrust suddenly into a lurching nuclear crisis, he gathers ministers and advisers around him and listens intently to their staunchly opposing views on escalation vs appeasement. They are also good men and good women, cleaving to the same basic humanist principles, while disagreeing volubly on how to put them into practise.
Smia’s film takes a more solemn, less kinetic approach than Kathryn Bigelow’s similarly themed “A House Of Dynamite” but shares its tacit, strangely idealistic faith that the people tasked with thinking through the unthinkable in the event of a nuclear threat, will be dedicated public servants of intelligence and integrity. Given what we know of the world today, the movie’s bid for ruthless realism is slightly undercut by its desire to believe that those whose fingers hover reluctantly over the nuclear button have steady hands. Then again it’s possible that brooding President Archambault only appears to be so selfless because the constricted screenplay (co-written by Smia and Thomas Finkielkraut though there scarcely seems room for two writers) doesn’t give him much self to speak of.
As the film begins, Archambault, already ensnared in the tight close-up that DP Nicolas Loir’s relentlessly focussed, somber cinematography will rarely allow him to escape, is receiving some devastating news involving his daughter. It will later be mentioned a couple of times, but this thinly sketched personal tragedy is all the backstory we’ll ever get. Even Archambault’s own political affiliations are kept unspecified.
All we know for sure is that he is on friendly terms with the beleaguered Ukrainian president, Kovalenko. Ukraine is — if you can believe it — in need of military support due to ongoing attacks by Russia, whose premier, Chernov is — don’t know where they got this from — a volatile despot. When Chernov survives an assassination attempt, which was quite likely a false flag operation, he uses the pretext to ramp up the war, and Archambault must decide how far his pledge to protect Ukrainian sovereignty extends.
At what point should a nuclear nation intervene, risking its own citizens’ safety, to defend an ally against the aggression of a powerful neighbor? His nominally sympathetic NATO allies refuse to commit to military intervention on the grounds that Ukraine is not a NATO member, so whatever France opts to do, she will be acting unilaterally. Then Chernov detonates an atomic bomb over the Black Sea as a show of force.
Archambault and his advisers are moved to the bunker-like war room that gives the film its name. And the nuclear Doomsday clock ticks about twenty seconds closer to midnight. There’s a prestige-TV-show feel to “Jupiter,” from its economical setting in the same few, featureless interior locations, to the division of the talky action into chapters with ominous headings like “Ultimatum” and “Sacrifice,” to the tension-building score from Olivier Marguerit, which is deployed lavishly over interstitial scenes of Archambault in the back of a car or striding purposefully down a passageway, the weight of the world on his bulky shoulders.
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