Stavisky… 1974

Set in the final months from late 1933 to January 1934, the film follows Serge Alexandre Stavisky, a controversial figure whose public image as a savvy financier masks a sprawling scheme. He operates as a “financial consultant,” founding a shadowy company that trades in international bonds, while secretly laundering stolen jewellery and shuffling funds to keep fraudulent bonds—sold through the Crédit Municipal in Bayonne—from being exposed. He also acts as a theatre impresario in Paris, gambles in casinos, and buys influence with the press, the police, and politicians, all while sustaining a lifestyle that aims to dazzle and intimidate.

At the center of the narrative is his devotion to his glamorous wife Arlette, and his use of her beauty to draw in funds from a Spanish revolutionary fascist. He tells his friends different versions of his past, mixing hints of a genuine political idealism with calculated self-justifications designed to keep his web of deception intact.

Between these strands, the film inserts brief flashes backward to his teenage awakening to a life of excess, a 1926 arrest as the petty crook Stavisky, and the suicide of his father after the family honor is tarnished. It also offers glimpses of his later rise and fall, punctuated by flash-forwards to his funeral and to the parliamentary inquiry into the Stavisky affair, where friends and allies testify with varying degrees of candor.

Parallel to the Stavisky saga are scenes portraying the arrival of Trotsky in France, seeking asylum, and his stay in country houses and hotels while left-wing activists visit him. These passages initially feel tangential, connected only by a police inspector who monitors Trotsky and later investigates Stavisky—until the end ties them more closely to the broader political tremors of the era. As Stavisky’s crimes unravel, Trotsky’s position becomes precarious, and ultimately he is expelled as a new government of national unity takes the stage.

The film closes on the unresolved death of Serge Alexandre Stavisky in a chalet in Chamonix, leaving the viewer with a stark question: was it a suicide akin to his father’s act, or an assassination carried out to silence him for good?