It seemed at first that this crime drama could be the French answer to “Spotlight” because here we also have a story about a journalist who exposes a first-class scandal, but screenwriter and director Thierry de Peretti decided to take a different path. The film premiered at the San Sebastian festival based on the book “Infiltration” published jointly by Liberation journalist Emmanuel Fansten and Hubert Avoine, a guy who claimed to have worked as an informant for the French police for years and decided to come out with shocking knowledge about smuggling drugs. And how the top of the police or the judicial apparatus there is directly involved in all this, and the story that will start as a newspaper article in Liberation and end up as a non-fiction book will become one of those stories so incredible that almost no one can believe it.
De Peretti decided to present this story in a significantly less spectacular way compared to similar films that dealt with a similar topic of journalistic investigations of scandals such as the aforementioned “Spotlight”, not to mention classics such as “All the President’s Men”. “Undercover” was shot in a realistic style, almost like a docudrama, and it’s actually very difficult to connect what’s actually going on there. Investigative journalist Stephane (Pio Marmai) does not have an easy job either, who even at first cannot understand what kind of story has fallen into his lap almost by itself. And while he is trying to understand the extent of what the mysterious Hubert Antoine (Roschdy Zem) will reveal to him, who claims that he kept huge quantities of drugs for the police and confirms all this with evidence, the viewer also tries to understand what it is about.
Primarily because everything that Hubert will reveal to him is incredible, and as soon as the first text appears in the newspaper accusing police chief Jacques Billard (Vincent Lindon) of creating a smuggling network, fierce counterattacks will begin. Very soon Stephane will realize that Hubert mixes reality with fabrications and exaggerations, and as he tries to find his way in this sea of shocking information and knowledge, so does the viewer try to distinguish what is reality and what is fiction. From the story of drug smuggling and the discovery that he kept a large amount of drugs for the police a few years earlier in Marbella, Spain, Hubert’s story will slowly enter an even darker underground and turn into a first-class political-informational scandal.
The most interesting part of the film, however, is the relationship between the journalist and the informant, because clearly Hubert is a suspicious guy and the question is how much he can be trusted. All the more so because his main motivation for getting out is revenge, since he claims that he was cheated out of the whole scheme, and it seems that he is still trying to find a way to benefit from it all. Although it is obvious that he has a lot of information from the intelligence underground, the question is how much he can be trusted, but the young and ambitious journalist will partly understand this story as an opportunity to make a name for himself. Although the style of “Undercover” was a bit strange and the story is quite confused and complicated while the rhythm was tiring at times, it is still an interesting and intriguing crime story.