He had never spoken before to say what he thought of the film and explain why the team never mentioned his name during promotional operations. Two days after the theatrical release of Kompromatthe latest feature film by director Jérôme Salle, Yoann Barbereau, the one who directly inspired this thriller starring Gilles Lellouche in the lead role, expressed on social networks. “Was I associated with the making of this film? No. Is it an adaptation of the book you read? No”, confirms the Nantes resident, really not a fan of the rather muscular fiction offered to the spectators.
Kompromat tells the story of a French expatriate in Russia and accused overnight of pedophilia. It is in fact a conspiracy organized by the secret services based on false documents in order to harm a person who could be considered an enemy of the state. Arrested and threatened with a long prison sentence, the hero has no choice but to escape if he wishes to have a chance to see France again.
Disappointed with the script
This is what happened to Yoann Barbereau, former director of the Alliance française d’Irkoutsk, between 2015 and 2017. Sentenced at the end of 2016 by Russian justice to 15 years in camp for acts of a sexual nature on his own daughter , facts that he has always disputed, he had managed two consecutive runs, one to join the French Embassy in Moscow, the other to reach France by his own means. In 2020, he described his story in a book called In the jails of Siberia. It was the discovery of the highly publicized case that made Jérôme Salle want to work on this film.
But the director and Barbereau did not manage to find common ground. Like recent press reviews and readers of his book, the Nantes native was very disappointed by certain caricatural shortcuts in the scenario, regretting in particular that the complex attachment he has for the Russian country has been passed over in silence.
“The weighted formula “This film and these characters are very loosely based on real events” gives an indication. All this is far from me, devilishly far from the book, I am not only talking about points of detail or a few verifiable facts”, writes Yoann Barbereau today. “It’s hard work to speak out against stupid manly discourse, against its trenches, its powerful fictions of ‘Western camp’ and ‘Eternal Russia’,” he continues.
Passionate about art and literature, Yoann Barbereau, 44, now lives in Finistère.