“Right now, fiction is the best way to tell how the world works. It is what captures reality, or at least part of it.” This is what filmmaker Xavier Giannoli, son of famous French journalists, says. “If you look at the front pages of French newspapers, it is difficult to find a single aspect on which they agree. There are no more facts, only opinions remain,” laments the director in Paris, where he is presenting his first television series, Blood and Money.
It was precisely the newspapers that alerted Giannoli to the so-called fraud of the century, which inspired him to write his fiction, based on the book of the same name by the journalist Fabrice Arfi. The scandal began in 2005 when the European Union introduced a carbon tax to combat global warming. The measure created an organized gang with members in different parts of the world, which stole between 10,000 and 20,000 million euros in VAT from letterbox companies in the following years.
The great success of recent French novels is a financial and emotional thriller that needs neither bombast nor explosions to build up its strong suspense. The first six chapters (already available on Filmin, the other six will be released on March 26) lay the foundation for a story of passions that go beyond greed.
In the fiction conceived with Giannoli (who has just adapted “Lost Illusions” based on Balzac's text), a police officer with a solid moral code and a tragic expression, played by Vincent Lindon, investigates the case. It tirelessly follows the unlikely connection between a group of criminals from Belleville, the immigrant district of Paris, and a millionaire addicted to gambling and risk-taking.
Vincent Lindon in the foreground plays the lead role in “Blood and Money”.
Blood and Money investigates the controversial and gigantic fraud. Although still a fiction, it constructs its own chronology of events and reinvents or merges some of its main characters to diagnose today's Europe, which suffers from the most cynical capitalisms.
Giannoli adds a pinch of Dostoyevsky to Balzac's realism. “Fabrice Arfi is a journalist and compiles facts in his book. The focus is on the characters. I preferred to focus on the shadows of the characters; “I wanted to show how current times speak through them,” says the director, a great believer in Martin Scorsese’s storytelling principles.
His father, Paul Giannoli, who died during the filming of this series, was involuntarily responsible for his cinematic vocation. At the age of eight, during a dizzying boat trip from Corsica to Marseille, he took him to the little cinema on the boat to see Raging Bull. He also gave him a moral code through the cinema. “His favorite film was Chariots of Fire. When these runners appeared who looked like angels fallen from heaven, I said to myself, “That's what a man must look like,” he recalls. The antagonists of Blood and Money are the exact opposite of this reference. But Giannoli can't help but be drawn to a type of characters “who are victims of themselves,” he says.
To show that corruption and base passions colonize all French classes, Niels Schneider plays the rich young Attias in Blood and Money, a role that Gaspard Ulliel began filming shortly before he died in a skiing accident in January 2022. Ramzy Bedia completes the main cast as Fitous, one of the con artists who combines his street tricks with Attias' financial tricks to create these shell companies in the organic sector. The two embody the class conflict that the director knows so well. His father was a Corsican man who had made himself through journalism, and his mother was a daughter of Parisian high society.
a tragic hero
The person responsible for indirectly explaining to the viewer the fraud that triggers the plot of Blood and Money is the most complex character, played by Vincent Lindon. The fictional former director of the National Judicial Customs Service, Simon Weynachter, closely pursues this criminal gang. He also does it for himself, to escape his personal chaos. Although he skillfully navigates the complexities of this financial conspiracy, he is unable to help his drug-addicted daughter.
“As Simon's reality shows, no one controls things or doesn't control them. “You can be the best in your career, the most powerful, the most moral, but there is nothing that allows you to avoid external aspects such as the illness or pain of those close to you,” says Lindon, also in Paris.
The actor wanted to work again with Giannoli, whom he had already met in the film The Apparition (2018), attracted by a story that contains in 12 chapters: “Crime, money, love, taxes, ecology, drugs, how difficult it is “is to be a father and a son…” he lists. The success he achieves is just an extra that hasn't factored into Lindon's calculations, even though he continues a good streak in a career that began almost a decade ago. The leading role in “The Law of the Market” (2015) by Stéphane Brizé brought him his first awards after more than 30 years in this profession: nothing less than the César and the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival. It also allowed him to take part in other recent milestones of French cinema such as Titane and Fuego.
Since nothing is under our control, Lindon tries to have fun on the road. “The law of the market was a no-budget film that cost two euros and that we would shoot in less than two weeks with a camera smaller than my hand. I did it because I had nothing to lose. It's easier to deal with failure by doing something you're at least passionate about than doing something that bores you beyond that,” he defends.
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