– With her third feature film, Rachel Lang shifts her arthouse cinema towards the spy thriller genre, exploring the inner workings and shadowy corners of the intelligence world
Eye Haïdara in Mata
Rachel Lang first came to prominence in 2016 with her debut feature film, Baden Baden, an unconventional comedy premiered at the Berlinale, followed by Our Men, a powerful drama exploring the waiting experienced by soldiers’ wives, which premiered in 2021 in the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes. The French filmmaker returns with a new film that is surprising at first glance, Mata, which will be released on May 27 in France (by Warner Bros) and in Belgium (by Imagine), taking her cinema into the realm of the thriller, within a genre that is generally highly formulaic: the spy film. But Rachel Lang, an army reservist, is well acquainted with the inner workings of the military, a theme already present in her short and feature films.
This time, she turns her attention to external security, following the trail of Mata (Eye Haïdara), a DGSE (French foreign intelligence service) agent who returns wounded from a covert operation in Niger, where Antoine (Raphaël Personnaz), her partner, has gone missing. Back in France, as she tries to understand what happened – and, above all, why – she is taken off the field and reassigned to the internal security offices. So, in secret, under the pretext of a spy mission, she attempts to shed light on what happened to Antoine, aided by a trainee recruit (Joséphine Japy). Between the gloomy basements of the DGSE, where Mata endures a barrage of interviews and sessions with the psychologist, and the murky glass-walled rooms of the DGSI (the French domestic intelligence agency) where she tries to dig beneath the surface, Mata searches for meaning. Except that when it comes to espionage, the less the agents know, the better off the state is. Faced with the opacity of a fiercely compartmentalised institution, her quest for the truth leads her down tortuous paths, to the point where she risks losing her grip on reality.
Mata is both a thriller and an anti-thriller that explores the inner workings of the profession, particularly the many moments of waiting and downtime, relegating the action to the sidelines, except for a few scenes charged with the unresolved tension of a character on an impossible quest. The film draws less on the genre’s conventions – apart from a particularly tense scene of a foot chase during the night of the Basel festival – than on the psychological thriller, focusing closely on its heroine’s inner turmoil as she faces the silence of her superiors, who deny her any access to the truth, but also regarding her personal commitment to this institution where betrayal, lies and pretence are inherent to its survival. A gritty, tightly-paced spy film, Mata dissects the workings of the system whilst painting a sensitive psychological portrait of its spy, powerfully portrayed by Eye Haïdara.
Mata was produced by Nolita Cinema and Chevaldeuxtrois (France), in co-production with Marvelous Production (France), France 3 Cinéma (France) and Wrong Men (Belgium). Indie Sales handles international sales.
(Translated from French)
