Netflix | ★★✩✩✩
Every minority winces at the publicity after their own have been found guilty of committing a crime; when it comes to Jews and the world of finance, for obvious reasons, perhaps doubly so. Maybe it’s sensitivity then that led the director to not identify the backgrounds of the protagonists for the first half of the documentary Lords of Scam, which is a missed opportunity, as it might have made for a more enlightening and entertaining experience.
To be fair, portraying financial shenanigans on screen is always a tough task.
The Wolf of Wall Street needed Leonardo DiCaprio, Scorsese, and dollops of drugs and nudity to tell its story, The Big Short was less successful even with Adam McKay chucking in half of Hollywood and Margot Robbie taking a bath. Director Guillaume Nicloux really tries his best in the documentary format; halogen signs for information, interviews in interesting locations, and instead of well-placed soap bubbles, a man playing with Lego who has the worst comb-over since, well, when I thought no one could tell. Yet still, this tale of how three friends used a VAT loophole in the emerging carbon market to swindle the French government out of an estimated 283 million euros fails to pay off.
Apart from being over long and messy, both problems easily solved by cutting a chunk from its one hour 45minutes run time; as one of the culprits is still in jail, and the other murdered, the film has no choice but to utilise the last conman standing, Marco Mouly with his various hangers-on to narrate what happened. The problem is, for a supposedly charming supposedly gift of the gab swindler, Mouly comes across as a self-aggrandising bore, whose every word is at best suspect. Lacking the veracity or charisma to centre a documentary, even with the kitchen sink it was never going to be enough to save it.
Which is a shame, because there is an interesting story here, more so when their Judaism is factored in. Marco and Samy are Tunisian Jews, who grew up in the rough Belleville district of Paris. Whether Marco’s claims of illiteracy are true, he certainly challenges the stereotypes of Jewish privilege. Arnaud Mimran, a banker from the upper-class 16th district, less so. Yet how much did their shared heritage bring them all together? How much wasn’t it enough to then keep them together after they’d initially got away with the crime? How much did it limit them when tougher and more deadly thugs got involved? And perhaps most interesting of all, and something only momentarily broached, how much did Jewish judges and prosecutors play a part in their downfall?
Were the Jewish members of the criminal justice system in any way driven above and beyond to capture and punish their tribal members on the opposite side of the law? Not just for ripping off the French people, but for making the rest of us look bad. Or after observing the outrageous barmitzvahs held for the criminal’s kids, with Akon, Pharell Williams and P Diddy performing, perhaps they were driven by barmitzvah envy. In the middle of bar mitzvah season myself, I know it’s enough to make anyone vengeful.
