Two infiltrators make the cultural news of the week. First, Thomas NLend, fake hooligan, real half-salt disguised as Mathias Cardet in order to get into the head of the anti-Semitic thinker Alain Soral, and into his organization with an insurrectionary aim; he recounts his years as an undercover in his book Jesters of Hate (Grasset).
Then, Sofiane Hambli, a large cannabis trafficker who became an informant for the Central Office for the Suppression of Illicit Drug Trafficking (OCRTIS), today in prison. He inspired the character of Hubert Antoine, played by Roschdy Zem in Thierry de Peretti’s film, State Scandal Investigation. Spies, traitors or renegades, they wouldn’t be without their case officer.
For Thomas NLend, it’s Noël Dubus, alias Monsieur Antoine, the go-between for crappy shots, from Takieddine to Georges Tron. For Sofiane Hambli, it is François Thierry, the narcotics boss, who has become Jacques Billard, played by Vincent Lindon in Peretti’s film.
Social malaise
Mythomania, paranoia, schizophrenia as a starter, main course, dessert. Like two Russian dolls in a contest of pseudonyms, a discomfort of the same nature makes them look alike. Social malaise. The evil of being where they were born. Black in the Parisian suburbs, Arab in Alsace. It doesn’t explain anything, it sets the stage for the malaise, and it doesn’t say why their need to escape turns them into unhappy people. As if they didn’t give a damn about ending badly. Or as if the prospect of ending well hurt them, which is not exactly the same thing.
Paradoxically, Thomas NLend’s book is more thrilling, more classic of the thriller genre than Peretti’s film, which is similar to a reflection on the function of doubt in the strategy of smoking out. And the indignation in the face of a state scandal, it is in NLend’s book that we feel it the most, in particular because we discover there that Alain Soral really exists, that he is not a character taken from a sketch by Dieudonné.
As a professional liar, NLend tells us about his life like that of a Candide, to the point that we end up doubting his professionalism in terms of double play. So we sympathize when, lost in the middle of a horde of Nazis determined to break the shops of the rue des Rosiers, he shouts: “But what are the police doing!” She does not do anything. She lets sink the one who thought he was the submarine responsible for informing her. She lets him drown with such indifference that it’s no longer Soral who causes a scandal, it’s what surrounds him. Logical under these conditions that the book itself becomes the stake of a battle inside a newspaper with scoops.
Juan Branco, third infiltrator
It’s the opposite with Thierry de Peretti who avoids all the clichés of the genre film: car chases and boring hideouts, syringes in the arm of the teenager and grieving mother, good cop and overwhelmed judge cynical, none of that in the story of this case of large-scale trafficking and corruption which gradually unravels, taking the plot of the film with it.
A third infiltrator infiltrates, it is Juan Branco, normalien, spokesperson for the yellow vests and putative defender of Salah Abdeslam. Branco never ceases to exfiltrate the circles of power where he grew up. He publishes his ninth anti-rich pamphlet, Thirteen Raiders (To the Devil Vauvert). He is of the three defectors the one who has no excuses, but aggravating circumstances: young, handsome, white, graduate, a bright future is promised to him on TF1 in a new scandalous game: I don’t wanna make millions. For Sofiane Hambli, it is likely that he found ears attentive to his Tales to sleep behind bars. For NLend, he already seems to have found a family in the film world, among all these plotters.