With Adults in the room, in Belgian cinemas from 6 November, Costa-Gavras offers a humour-tinged vision of the Greek economic crisis.
The Greek-French film director Costa-Gavras had been trying to make a film about the Greek economic crisis for years, having accumulated the documentation material but without managing to find the right angle to tackle the subject. Everything fell into place when he chanced upon an article written by Yánis Varoufákis, former finance minister under the Tsipras I government. The director went to meet the politician, who was then in the middle of writing his book “Adults in the room: My Battle with Europe’s Deep Establishment”, and adapted it as a screenplay, resulting in a political film told in the style of a thriller.
At the start of the project, his 19th feature-length fiction film (the previous one, Capital, in 2012, was set against the backdrop of international finance), Costa-Gavras set out to make a film about “a Europe governed by a group of cynical people disconnected from human, political and cultural concerns”. The director describes his film, which was shot over 12 weeks between April and June 2019 in Athens, Paris, Brussels, Riga, Strasbourg, Frankfurt and London, as an “ancient Greek tragedy set in modern times. This is the story of a country and of its people, trapped in a network of power – the vicious cycle of Eurogroup meetings that imposed the dictatorship of austerity upon Greece”.
Adults in the room is set in 2015, behind the scenes at the European Union. After seven years of crisis, a bankrupt Greece is on the edge of the abyss, but with a new, freshly elected government, the people seem to have been seized by a new hope. The new finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis (played by the excellent Christos Loulis), a member of the inner circle of the Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras (Alexandros Bourdoumis), has six months to save his country from crisis. But as the audience discovers in the first few minutes, the government would only have five months until it stepped down… Dispatched to Paris, London and Berlin to sound out his opposite numbers (who were, in turn, condescending in France, indifferent in England and hostile in Germany), and then to the Eurogroup to plead his country’s cause, he would have to contend with fierce proponents of Grexit, particularly Wolfgang Schäuble (Ulrich Tukur), the German politician who believed firmly in a policy of extreme budgetary rigour and austerity. Very quickly, from one meeting to the next, from low blows to unkept promises, ways would be found of bringing pressure to bear to create divisions between the Greek minister and his Prime Minister, as well as to destroy the credibility of the former.
It is, unquestionably, a tragedy, but Costa-Gavras presents the never-ending meetings of the Eurogroup as a farce, a sort of playground in which any dialogue is usually impossible, where the sulky big kids refuse to give any ground, where the air is thick with the sound of sniggering, where gang mentality and cynicism are the order of the day, where whispering in corners takes the place of negotiations. Despite the determination, optimism and candour of Yanis Varoufakis, a brilliant negotiator, the meetings just go round in circles and end up looking like a huge sandpit where the older children refuse to share their toys with the new little kid.
At the age of 86, Costa-Gavras, who was awarded the prestigious Jaeger-LeCoultre Glory To the Filmmaker prize in recognition of his entire career at the Venice International Film Festival this year, has lost none of his legendary indignation and dares to question the very concept of European democracy.
Less hard-hitting than his great classics (Z, The Confession, State of Siege, Section Spéciale, Missing) in terms purely of form, due to the lengthy dialogues attempting to explain the mechanics of the crisis - sometimes at the expense of the drama - Adults in the room makes use of the device popularised by Aaron Sorkin in the American series The West Wing, namely the “walk and talk”, with the cast reciting thousands of words whilst walking along behind the scenes at the Eurogroup or at their HQs. Ultimately captivating, trying to provide as much information as possible about a subject that is hard to sum up in two hours (viewers should consider taking a notebook and pen into the showing with them), dealing brilliantly with a cruel irony, Adults in the room could undoubtedly have afforded a few pauses for breath, as the deluge of information is such that it will inevitably end up overwhelming members of the audience who are not experts on economic policy.
That said, nobody comes close to Costa-Gavras when it comes to painting a picture of the grotesque and that is particularly true of the dream sequence of the unexpected final scene, which detaches itself from the rest of the story and goes off on a tour of the kind of cinema of the absurd beloved of Luis Buñuel or Bertrand Blier. (Grégory Cavinato)