Review by Beatrice On 23-Jun-2023
The third film in Brizé's trilogy about the world of work.
It opens with family photos, from older, happy, and carefree ones to more recent ones.
Philippe is a provincial manager in France for a multinational company.
There is talk of redundancy, and a 10 percent reduction in jobs is required. Dr. Lefevre, an internal company examiner, indicates that this reduction would cause serious quality and management problems for the branch. Philippe understands this concern and documents in detail the difficulties that would arise, providing an alternative plan. Despite compliments for the work done, he is told that this was not the request made to the manager, and if he has a boss to answer to, that boss in turn has an inflexible master: Wall Street.
At the same time, his ongoing divorce and the manifestation of a psychiatric problem in his youngest son turn Philippe's life into an existential hell.
Having to reassure employees on one side and meet shareholders' demands on the other traps him in a significant legal dilemma.
Maximizing profits is the company's sole objective, which tends to relocate, and the dilemma oscillates between becoming an accomplice in a ruthless system or returning, after 25 years, to an unstable life.
After The Law of the Market (2015) and At War (2018), Brizé returns to the central theme of the trilogy: a man's place in the system.
The theme of the cultural industry, globalized capitalism, and the hell of the contemporary labor market culminates in Another World, the best film of the trilogy, for its existential tension on family themes disrupted by the world of work, for its ethical-political tension, and for its ability to translate into stories and figures of great suffering and humanity the boundary between documentary and fiction.
Here fiction dominates, artistically rendering visible what the market world irreparably reproduces.
Themes skillfully treated by Laurent Cantet, Robert Guédiguian, and Ken Loach have lingered for years on topics that are easy to overlook, and on which this cinema pauses, researches, and documents.
Brizé, with a dry narrative, does not detract from the humanity of these themes, casting Vincent Lindon in undeniably effective roles.
Although rooted in the world of work, the director's filmography becomes a kaleidoscope through which to identify the facets of the system, with all its distortions and deformations.
“If money becomes the symbolic generator of all values, ethics, in the face of technology, becomes pathetic: it has never been seen that impotence is able to stop a power. The problem is: not what we can do with the technical tools we have designed, but what technology can do to us.”
23-Jun-2023 by Beatrice