It’s early days on the Venice Movie Pageant, however there appears to be an rising theme of the dehumanizing nature of labor beneath late capitalism (see additionally: “Bugonia” and “No Different Selection”). French actress an director Valérie Donzelli has a really particular riff on this theme in “A Pied D’oeuvre (the English title is actually “At Work”), her fashionable riches-to-rags story a few man who offers up life as a profitable, well-remunerated photographer in Paris to be able to scrape a dwelling as an informal laborer and use his free time making an attempt to turn out to be an creator that his youngsters wish to learn.
Paul (Bastien Bouillon) is taking a hammer to drywall after we meet him, because the life he used to know is shattering into items. On the age of 42, he has switched artistic lanes from being a photographer pulling in €3k to €8k a month to being a author who has already spent the advance on his unpromising third e book. In the meantime, his latest ex-wife (Donzelli) has moved to Montreal alongside together with his son and daughter and Paul has moved out of their massive home right into a tiny studio. His thinly veiled account of the breakdown of their marriage, “The Story of the Finish” his agent deems unsaleable. If being a great author means dwelling in such a means that the fabric generates itself, then Paul’s life and vocation are each in want of an overhaul.
Paul needs to search out the sort of work that leaves him sufficient time to write down, and that is how he finally ends up on the “Jobbing” web site, establishing a profile and itemizing his guide labor/ handyman expertise. Donzelli’s unflashy model of path has a brisk simplicity, letting observational particulars play out with out underlining them, in order that mildly comedian moments may simply as simply have you ever grimacing in recognition. The tiny ghost of a smile that Paul performs to his webcam for take two of his profile image is the world in a grain of sand, reflecting the truth that it’s not sufficient for folks to promote their labor, they need to seem to emanate a deep sense of well-being from inside whereas, say, dismantling a mezzanine or mowing your garden.
This can be a movie parked out within the trivialities of Paul’s new work tradition and attuned to the truth that, when your work is underpaid, you’ll be able to by no means get sufficient of it. Members of the Jobbing web site are pinged every time a job inside their skillset is listed, at which level, it’s a bidding struggle to the underside as jobbers set their charges ever-lower. Paul generally bids at €20 for jobs that take hours, which means his price is nowhere close to the wheelhouse of minimal wage.
Nonetheless, as he displays, he has a newbie’s zeal to make this method work, and that provides him a bonus over extra disenfranchised jobbers with a long-term dependency on it. Tailored from an autobiographical novel by Frank Courtes, the movie is within the trenches of Paul’s private expertise whereas retaining the attitude that most individuals who flip to Jobbing achieve this out of desperation reasonably than idealism. In contrast to the migrant employees that he competes with for jobs, Paul remains to be in receipt of humble month-to-month royalties. “€200-300 a month is just not poverty but it surely offers a transparent view of it,” he writes. Though Paul has relative privilege right here, relative privilege doesn’t pay the heating payments and it’s clear — by means of the glimpses of debasement that happen with growing frequency — that our hero is flirting with smash.
The folks round him berate him for his decisions, his sister says that he’s not a “actual” poor particular person and asks why he doesn’t get a distinct job. Verbalising the idealism that quietly motors beneath the floor of each the movie and its protagonist, Paul says that “some slaves are well-paid as we speak.” He has tasted the life {that a} corporatized artistic job should purchase and has discovered it missing. His newfound precarity is just not romanticized, it’s introduced as the required various to a much less appropriate path. He takes Robert Frost’s highway much less traveled within the hope that it’ll make all of the distinction.
Half-way by means of the movie, he has an encounter with the person he was, which is to say, in his capability as a driver, he picks up a person that he knew from the pictures world. Over dinner, this man, who nonetheless has a well-paid job, an enormous home, and luxe travels, affords a sleek understanding of what his former peer is doing and contrasts it together with his personal “hyper-consumption. … You’re reducing down, it’s good.”
The slim narrative framework is undergirded by a taut, eloquent script by Valérie Donzelli and Gilles Marchand (whose earlier writing credit embody Cannes 2025 titles “Enzo” and “Case 137”). The ring of lived expertise doesn’t hamper or labor this clear-eyed depiction of a person whose need for freedom may see him free-fall into a distinct entice: poverty.
Just about a one-man-show, Bouillon carries the movie aided by the sort of face that appears completely different from each angle. His shoppers are inquisitive about him. “You don’t look the half,” says one lady as he arrives in his cable-knit sweater and owl glasses to assemble her armoire. The glimpses of the those that he meets on this new line of labor feed his writely creativeness and he reconstructs them on the web page. Fears that the narrative will finish in a cliche, with Paul writing a e book about being poor that makes him wealthy once more, are fortunately unfounded because the movie deftly avoids any such entice.
If this modest fable feels slight in a contest dominated by filmmakers swinging for the fences, then it’s not for an absence of substance. Stuffed with throwaway insights into the micro-climate of a very hellish financial panorama, “At Work” is a fascinating story a few man making an attempt to write down an enticing story with a diamond of hard-won knowledge at its core.
Grade: B+
“At Work” premiered on the 2025 Venice Movie Pageant. It’s at present searching for U.S. distribution.
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