This film won a lot of awards in 1999-2000 for best new director and best actor, etc., and it's not hard to see why. Cantet has made a taut, thrilling drama out of very unlikely materials, and has something intelligent to say about the world we live in.
Jalil Lespert gives an amazing performance in the lead role, playing a working-class young man who is socially mobile via business school. He returns to his industrial home town to become a management intern at the same factory where his father has been employed in a repetitious, soul-killing piece-work job for his entire career, and then ruins his chances at advancement when he reveals that the factory plans to increase profits by laying off a group of career-long workers that includes his father. He attempts to jump-start a strike, but the father refuses to participate and hates him for showing the spine that he (the father) never did. Yet we can also see the drama from the father's perspective: the tension between the son's disappointment and resentment, and the father's self-loathing, impatience with a son he has sacrificed for, and pathetic desire for the whole painful drama to simply go away, becomes excruciating.
The tension between father and son (and the way their conflict triangles the mother) is almost unbearable, and it condenses the larger social violence summed up in the management-worker relations. The nominal point of disagreement is the 35-hour work week, but of course the general logic of the horrendous management-labor violence is the same as it was in Zola's "Germinal," and the landscape here summarizes the industrial-worker world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Everything about the film is remarkable. The writing and directing by Cantet is wonderful. The editing is extremely taut, and there is NO musical soundtrack, which is all the more surprising given the amount of suspense and tension the film produces.
This is both a first-rate drama, an exercise in contemporary sociology, a great performance by one of the up-and-coming leading men in French cinema (Jalil Lespert), and a very insightful commentary before the fact on the Sarkozy era of neoliberal economic violence against workers in France. Ultimately, this a smart and artistically-sophisticated (but never "artsy") film about the human price of contemporary economic transformations in the (over)developed nations.
Jalil Lespert gives an amazing performance in the lead role, playing a working-class young man who is socially mobile via business school. He returns to his industrial home town to become a management intern at the same factory where his father has been employed in a repetitious, soul-killing piece-work job for his entire career, and then ruins his chances at advancement when he reveals that the factory plans to increase profits by laying off a group of career-long workers that includes his father. He attempts to jump-start a strike, but the father refuses to participate and hates him for showing the spine that he (the father) never did. Yet we can also see the drama from the father's perspective: the tension between the son's disappointment and resentment, and the father's self-loathing, impatience with a son he has sacrificed for, and pathetic desire for the whole painful drama to simply go away, becomes excruciating.
The tension between father and son (and the way their conflict triangles the mother) is almost unbearable, and it condenses the larger social violence summed up in the management-worker relations. The nominal point of disagreement is the 35-hour work week, but of course the general logic of the horrendous management-labor violence is the same as it was in Zola's "Germinal," and the landscape here summarizes the industrial-worker world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Everything about the film is remarkable. The writing and directing by Cantet is wonderful. The editing is extremely taut, and there is NO musical soundtrack, which is all the more surprising given the amount of suspense and tension the film produces.
This is both a first-rate drama, an exercise in contemporary sociology, a great performance by one of the up-and-coming leading men in French cinema (Jalil Lespert), and a very insightful commentary before the fact on the Sarkozy era of neoliberal economic violence against workers in France. Ultimately, this a smart and artistically-sophisticated (but never "artsy") film about the human price of contemporary economic transformations in the (over)developed nations.