As a fan of previous Costa-Gavras films, I was disappointed in this most recent effort. I was doubly dismayed that nearly everyone who reviewed it here seems to have missed the point entirely.
Here's a sample from another IMDb user: "In USA (as far as I know), for instance, some unemployed people live on the streets or under the bridges." That's brilliant; thanks for the speculative remark about the USA of your imagination. "The Ax" asks us to feel sympathy for an upper-middle-class employee who's been fired from his job. He drives a nice car, has a nice family, and lives in a nice big house in the suburbs of Strasbourg.
(He also doesn't have a cell phone and rarely checks e-mail, apparently, even though this film was made in 2005.) Others in his situation -- those whom he decides to kill -- are similarly privileged, likely supplemented by a generous severance package. One of our main character's victims refers to his maid and drives a Mercedes. So you're unemployed, looking for work, and generally despondent about life. Which is it: Are you going to actively seek a new job or will you whine about it while fooling yourself that maintaining your old, excessive way of life is still possible? The "critique" of this film -- that "Anglo-Saxon liberalism" is destroying people's livelihoods and creating an ever-more-consumeristic, violent, and oversexualized society, is precisely wrong. Yes, unemployment is a major problem in France, but you needn't look to the posh neighborhoods of Alsace-Lorraine to explore it. How about les banlieues surrounding Paris, where steep unemployment rates help to drive despair and actual violence among the immigrant youth? Yet the remedy to this very real problem -- loosening some of the restrictions of France's extremely rigid labor market -- is precisely what Costa-Gavras argues against, in the name of social justice. The bizarre and manufactured "class solidarity" among the upper-middle-class former paper employees in the film is a weird perversion of "Fight Club"'s blue-collar ethos, a mentality we're encouraged to agree with at the unspoken expense of the actual poor and downtrodden of French society.
Give me a break. Costa-Gavras should stick to political intrigue, not economics. There are very few situations in which there is literally one job position that everyone is fighting for; are we honestly supposed to believe that the skills and experience gained from a high-level paper job are not applicable to other industries? And really, after several different versions of TV's "The Office," can we truly believe the cloying, earnest attitude of the main character, who apparently believes that his job in the paper industry is helping society? The film negates its own premise, unwittingly, by pointing out the horrible downsides to France's calcified labor market and blaming the results on capitalism instead of the very restrictions whose abolishment would solve many of the problems it raises. A further sin is the film's acknowledgment that underlying many of these (very real) French anxieties is a fear that Eastern Europeans stand poised to take their jobs. That's the price of both the free market and EU membership, and a symptom of general xenophobia.
Beyond this philosophical disagreement, the film itself lazily relies on unnecessary first-person narration and a complete lack of subtlety. (Oh look, the TV's on! Guess the tube is just full of cussing Americans and their guns, slowly infiltrating our pristine society!) And finally, the film either takes place in a bizarre alternate reality in which cell phones and e-mail are not common, or the filmmaker actively chose to set the story 5-10 years in the past (why? because of the book?). If anything, the story would be more relevant in the present, when the choice between Sarkozy and Royal presents the stark choice embodied in "The Ax"'s narrative.
Here's a sample from another IMDb user: "In USA (as far as I know), for instance, some unemployed people live on the streets or under the bridges." That's brilliant; thanks for the speculative remark about the USA of your imagination. "The Ax" asks us to feel sympathy for an upper-middle-class employee who's been fired from his job. He drives a nice car, has a nice family, and lives in a nice big house in the suburbs of Strasbourg.
(He also doesn't have a cell phone and rarely checks e-mail, apparently, even though this film was made in 2005.) Others in his situation -- those whom he decides to kill -- are similarly privileged, likely supplemented by a generous severance package. One of our main character's victims refers to his maid and drives a Mercedes. So you're unemployed, looking for work, and generally despondent about life. Which is it: Are you going to actively seek a new job or will you whine about it while fooling yourself that maintaining your old, excessive way of life is still possible? The "critique" of this film -- that "Anglo-Saxon liberalism" is destroying people's livelihoods and creating an ever-more-consumeristic, violent, and oversexualized society, is precisely wrong. Yes, unemployment is a major problem in France, but you needn't look to the posh neighborhoods of Alsace-Lorraine to explore it. How about les banlieues surrounding Paris, where steep unemployment rates help to drive despair and actual violence among the immigrant youth? Yet the remedy to this very real problem -- loosening some of the restrictions of France's extremely rigid labor market -- is precisely what Costa-Gavras argues against, in the name of social justice. The bizarre and manufactured "class solidarity" among the upper-middle-class former paper employees in the film is a weird perversion of "Fight Club"'s blue-collar ethos, a mentality we're encouraged to agree with at the unspoken expense of the actual poor and downtrodden of French society.
Give me a break. Costa-Gavras should stick to political intrigue, not economics. There are very few situations in which there is literally one job position that everyone is fighting for; are we honestly supposed to believe that the skills and experience gained from a high-level paper job are not applicable to other industries? And really, after several different versions of TV's "The Office," can we truly believe the cloying, earnest attitude of the main character, who apparently believes that his job in the paper industry is helping society? The film negates its own premise, unwittingly, by pointing out the horrible downsides to France's calcified labor market and blaming the results on capitalism instead of the very restrictions whose abolishment would solve many of the problems it raises. A further sin is the film's acknowledgment that underlying many of these (very real) French anxieties is a fear that Eastern Europeans stand poised to take their jobs. That's the price of both the free market and EU membership, and a symptom of general xenophobia.
Beyond this philosophical disagreement, the film itself lazily relies on unnecessary first-person narration and a complete lack of subtlety. (Oh look, the TV's on! Guess the tube is just full of cussing Americans and their guns, slowly infiltrating our pristine society!) And finally, the film either takes place in a bizarre alternate reality in which cell phones and e-mail are not common, or the filmmaker actively chose to set the story 5-10 years in the past (why? because of the book?). If anything, the story would be more relevant in the present, when the choice between Sarkozy and Royal presents the stark choice embodied in "The Ax"'s narrative.