From Russia With Love without the fun, The Courier without the frisson, KOMPROMAT is a flat thriller that fizzles rather than sizzles.

Gilles Lellouche stars as Mathieu, a gregarious and dedicated civil servant who accepts a posting to Irkutsk as the head of Siberia’s Alliance Française. He hopes the change will be good for his family and struggling marriage, however Mathieu’s staging of a cultural event and support of artistic expression sees him fall foul of local authorities.

Fanned by his failing marriage, he is falsely accused of a disseminating child pornography, a charge fabricated by Russia’s Federal Security Service. Framed as a kiddie fiddler, arrested, imprisoned, and isolated, Mathieu is in a tight spot.

His plight is reminiscent of the SMERSH plan to tar James Bond with ignominy in From Russia With Love, but Mathieu is not a trained super spy.

Defending himself is impossible, the French authorities are hopeless, scared stiff of damaging diplomatic ties. He must rely on his own resourcefulness and an unexpected ally in the form of a disillusioned translator, Svetlana.

She is the wife of a mutilated ex-soldier, sent to the front like cannon fodder in Afghanistan or Chechnya, or Ukraine (take your pick of opportunistic Russian expansionism) broken, physically handicapped, diminished.

Svetlana lives with him in a small two-room apartment, loves him even though he is only a shadow of the man he once was. She has her own axe to grind against the State and shows great courage and defiance by deciding to help Mathieu.

Mysterious and complex, contradictory but complementary, Svetlana is played by Joanna Kulig, in an enticing, enigmatic and compelling performance.

As an indictment against the totalitarian state, KOMPROMAT succeeds. As a thriller, it works quite well in the middle section but it gets a little overheated with a finale that is full of clumsy cliché and bum notes.

Compromised, KOMPROMAT is still worth seeing for Kulig.