By Dennis Hartley

(Originally posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo on June 3, 2017)

This French film might be a little too close for comfort…while ostensibly based on the rise of far-right populist candidate Marine Le Pen, it could just as well be the cautionary tale America desperately needed about, oh, two years ago. Emilie Dequenne is quite good as a single-mom home care nurse with no previous political experience who gets sweet-talked by a local right-wing power-broker into running for mayor on a populist ticket. Her campaign is compromised once she becomes romantically re-involved with her old high-school boyfriend, who claims to have put his dubious past involving a xenophobic extremist group behind him. Belgian director Lucas Belvaux’s film (reminiscent of Michael Ritchie’s The Candidate) is a sobering reminder that that old axiom about “the road to hell” being “paved with good intentions” is truer than ever.