Only for your eyes. A secret organization is trying to recruit a newly appointed French diplomat. The official’s name is Dominique Ophal (code number 51), was born in 1940, absolutely clean, lives in Paris, has a wife (N52), two children and firm moral principles – blackmail him with the possibility of publicizing the fact that he is cheating on his spouse, it will not work – 51 will simply report to his superiors and resign. Surveillance is broken, it is possible to get only an inventory of the contents of the wallet of the object (old pictures, reproduction of a surreal picture and other useless nonsense), hard-to-reach friends of Ophal give details that are interesting only for memoirists, and in the dossier there are almost no high-quality photos - in short, the task is almost impossible, but the special service is very necessary.
The picture of a little-known French director with a frightening name Deville outside his native country immediately wants to be compared with Citizen Kane. “Dossier 51” is really a bit of a paraphrase of Wells classics: the same plot with the search for secret pages in the biography, only instead of a journalist – secret agents, instead of banal curiosity – quite logical forging compromising, and instead of media mogul Kane – initially an ordinary character, that is, in his place could be anyone. But Deville, unlike Wells, does not approach the hero at all, let the viewer know his life almost by heart by the end. The 51st can be seen for the first time clearly and not in the photo only for a couple of seconds in the finale, in successive agents, from whose eyes the camera captures, only hands and sometimes reflections in the mirror are visible. Even the final surgery was replaced by her rehearsal under the guidance of a psychiatrist with infernal charisma. In the frame, mainly tape recorders, photo collages and varying degrees of presentability of the face of friends and relatives of the object secretly interviewed in an informal setting. Behind the scenes are reports of departments to each other, wiretaps and one single play by Schubert in different variations, and just the least of all. When the protocol language tells absolutely everything, including the most inappropriate things for this (like the degree of attractiveness of the maid embedded in the house to the object), the movie turns from a thriller into a kind of comedy.
The Dossier, however, is not just a witty spy film with an original form, or even a political satire, as it may seem at first: the operations themselves and the Secret Service are so abstract that they are, of course, a metaphor, but not a metaphor for anything concrete. This is human society as a whole, cockroaches in the head, just the circumstances that are sure to pull the skeleton out of each closet, even if its owner does not quite know what is hidden inside (and the mystery of 51 in the end is much more serious than Kane’s sleds). But this owner, it seems, does not exist at all: the person himself is just a closet with a rag skeleton wrapped in many - the more, the worse it will be later - a dossier that must be read between the lines - only when it is really read this way, everything immediately loses meaning, and the dossier can be torn into shreds and thrown into the trash.