What does politics have to learn from showbusiness? The answer, of course, is everything. Our nominal leaders are mere showmen, selling ideas that have been dreamed up behind the scenes by policy-spods, bureaucrats and that shadowy gang of lizard men who meet in the woods in Utah every second Tuesday in March. The quintessence of the modern show-politician is Nicolas Sarkozy, who with his matinee idol pompadour and Cuban heels is surely at every waking moment simply playing the role of a president in his adolescent mind.

Certainly Woody Allen has identified him as a natural thesp. Asked by the French weekly Journal du Dimanche whether he could imagine casting Sarkozy in one of his films, Allen said: "If such an idea ever came into my head, I could no doubt find him work." Sarkozy doesn't seem the type to deliver convincing angst, but Allen qualified his idea: "I could see him in a Bogart-type role." Really? Lost in Showbiz sees him more as a Gallic Han Solo in a French interpretation of Star Wars, filmed in black and white, with longer silences and more smoking on the Millennium Falcon.