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French director Robert Guédiguian leaves behind his beloved Marseilles to offer up this sombre and ambivalent portrait of the late President Francois Mitterrand, who's superbly played by veteran actor Michel Bouquet. Based on Georges-Marc Benamou's controversial book and shot without frills, The Last Mitterrand focusses on the final year of the socialist politician's life and is narrated by a young left-wing journalist Antoine (Jalil Lespert), who's been hired to write the man's memoirs.

The dialogue-heavy The Last Mitterrand does assume a certain degree of knowledge of 20th-century French politics on the part of the viewer, alluding to such figures as police chiefs Rene Bosquet and Maurice Papon, both of whom were instrumental in deporting French Jews to the Nazi concentration camps.

"A FIGURE OF FASCINATING CONTRASTS"

The plot meanwhile revolves around Antoine who's becomes obsessed about Mitterrand's role in the Vichy government during the German occupation of World War Two. Any definitive truth about his subject's actions during this traumatic era remains elusive however. Antoine's investigation also pushes him further apart from his own girlfriend, who despises what she sees as Mitterrand's betrayal of the working-class (as her Communist father exclaims, "If he's a Socialist, I'm the Pope").

Thanks to Bouquet's multilayered performance, the terminally ill Mitterrand emerges as a figure of fascinating contrasts. He's a wily political schemer but with an encyclopaedic knowledge of literature and a love of actresses, (although his real-life philandering is glossed over by Guédiguian). And even if he's acutely sensitive to criticisms of his conduct and is terrified of his own mortality, his self-regard is such that he's convinced that history will judge him as "the last of the great presidents."

In French with English subtitles.