Denis M\u00e9nochet plays a fictional French president in Alexandre Smia\u2019s film. Photograph: PR<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a scenario that is far from unrealistic, the French film-maker Alexandre Smia said on the eve of his film\u2019s premiere.<\/p>\n
\u201cEven if the US disengagement from Nato is not official, we have reason to doubt that the US would offer its nuclear umbrella if one European city were to be attacked nowadays,\u201d said Smia, who has previously directed episodes of the French spy TV series Le Bureau des L\u00e9gendes.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd considering that France<\/a> is the only country in Europe that is both a member of the European community, of the security council of the United Nations and of Nato, it naturally becomes actually the country where the responsibility of making decisions lies.\u201d<\/p>\n He added: \u201cFilling the void when faced by a threat is not even a choice any more, it becomes almost an obligation.\u201d<\/p>\n Scheduled for release in France in November, Jupiter will focus minds but also divide opinion before presidential elections next April. After the release of a trailer, some voices on the far right have tried to dismiss the production as a \u201cpropaganda film\u201d intended to shore up support for a centrist candidate against Marine Le Pen\u2019s National Rally.<\/p>\n The film\u2019s title, however, is far from a straightforward reference to the outgoing president Emmanuel Macron, who famously called for a \u201cJupiterian\u201d head of state. Fran\u00e7ois Mitterrand, too, was nicknamed Jupiter by the national press and the command room inside the bunker beneath the Palais d\u2019\u00c9lys\u00e9e, where most of the film\u2019s action takes place, was named after the Roman king of the gods under Val\u00e9ry Giscard d\u2019Estaing.<\/p>\n In the film, the French head of state, Archambault, enters the nuclear standoff still reeling from the loss of his daughter \u2013 a biographical note that evokes Charles de Gaulle (who lost a daughter to pneumonia) and Jacques Chirac (who outlived his daughter Laurence).<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to The Guide<\/p>\n Get our weekly pop culture email, free in your inbox every Friday<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n The socialist ex-president Hollande advised the makers of the film during their research, and Smia said he had picked M\u00e9nochet for the role precisely because he did not physically resemble any previous president.<\/p>\n Yet while Jupiter is unequivocal about the need for French leadership, the film does not necessarily show that France is up to the job. To be taken seriously by the film\u2019s Putin-equivalent character, its French president is forced to engage with Richard Nixon\u2019s madman theory: giving off an appearance of irrationality to make otherwise non-credible threats seem credible.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a move that risks incensing the French public and alienating the president\u2019s political allies in Europe and within his own cabinet. \u201cWould any European leader be able to play the madman?\u201d asked Smia. \u201cThe theory of the madman is indeed dangerous and I don\u2019t think that any European leader would do that.\u201d<\/p>\n Lead actor M\u00e9nochet, who previously played a French president in Guy Maddin\u2019s oddball G7 comedy Rumours, is best known to cinema lovers as a French farmer who crumbles under the interrogation of Christoph Waltz\u2019s Nazi general in the opening scene of Quentin Tarantino\u2019s Inglourious Basterds.<\/p>\n M\u00e9nochet was cast in the film partly because he does not resemble previous French presidents. Photograph: PR<\/p>\n In Jupiter, his character must display the utmost mental robustness, especially in the face of personal insults by the film\u2019s Russian president Chernov, who implies that Archambault\u2019s daughter lost her life because of western \u201cdecadence\u201d.<\/p>\n At screenings on the Lido, French journalists left the auditorium fiercely debating whether the film was an advert for a more aggressive French stance or a warning against it.<\/p>\n The sustained ambiguity of Smia\u2019s film puts it in a line with a number of recent works of French cinema that are set in contained spaces, prioritise verbal sparring over plot twists and leave audiences debating moral rights and wrongs, such as courtroom dramas Anatomy of a Fall by Justine Triet and The Goldman Case<\/a> by C\u00e9dric Kahn, who also plays a supporting role in Jupiter.<\/p>\n \u201cThis trend is very important and I hope it will become a movement,\u201d said Smia. \u201cIn a time of simplification, films about moral ambiguities, about the difficulty of finding your own path and direction, are very, very important.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Russia has detonated a nuclear warhead over the Black Sea to underline its desire to revenge an assassination…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":607607,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[146,85,46],"class_list":["post-607606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/607606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=607606"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/607606\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/607607"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=607606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=607606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=607606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/1788694095_46_500.jpg\")
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