In a blue silk dressing-gown royally patterned in gold, the Minister of the Interior sits in his salon watching television. Just for a moment, as his private secretary hurries in to inform him that a terrorist group has kidnapped the American ambassador in Paris, he and his lady, her white hair piled high in a discreet pompadour, are waxwork echoes of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette learning that the mob is at the gates. Seconds later, as a helicopter lands in front of the chateau to whisk the Minister off to deal with the crisis, floodlights illuminate the façade of the building as though it were a monument historique for public delectation.

This superb gloss—the irony, of course, is that nothing in the state's machiavellian handling of the situation will bear public scrutiny—is almost the only flourish Chabrol has brought to Nada …, a hallucinatingly faithful adaptation...