Old Yorker

La loi du marché

Stéphane Brizé  (2015)

The Measure of a Man begins with an interview between an employment agency counsellor and Thierry Taugourdeau, the protagonist of Stéphane Brizé’s film.  Thierry, who’s fifty-one years old, has been unemployed for over a year, since he was laid off by the factory where he worked.  He’s recently completed five months of training as a crane driver.  His employment counsellor now admits that training won’t be enough to get a job – news that makes Thierry understandably angry and frustrated.  Stéphane Brizé goes on to describe Thierry’s continuing efforts to find work, his attempts to raise cash or secure a bank loan in the meantime, and his home life.  He’s married, with one child – a teenage boy, who has cerebral palsy but is bright and wants to go to college.   About halfway through the film, Thierry gets a job, as a supermarket security guard.  (We don’t see how he gets the job; Brizé simply introduces Thierry in his new place of work.)  Each scene, from the start of the film, is flawlessly realistic.   The Measure of a Man is gripping as drama and, in its early stages, suspenseful:  you wonder if the realism and the dramatic grip can be sustained.  After a while, you know they will be – at least for as long as Brizé keeps things at the same level.

Several of the exchanges are at once sad and funny.  Thierry and his wife are still paying a mortgage on their apartment but they own a modest mobile home, which they try to sell:  the negative attitude of the prospective buyers emerges gradually and inexorably, as Thierry determinedly fights his corner.  As well as having a real job interview via Skype, he role-plays as an interviewee and, in the round-table discussion that follows, listens to a litany of unfavourable comments on his performance from his fellow unemployed.  The session co-ordinator asks the others in the group if they think they’d like to meet Thierry in real life and they say they’d rather not – although he’s sitting among them.  Shortly after Thierry starts his job at the supermarket, he attends a retirement do for Gisèle, one of the longest-serving staff; her colleagues sing a song that one of them has arranged in her honour.  One bit is more simply and enjoyably funny.  Thierry and his wife go to dance classes:  they move easily dancing together; when the male dance instructor intervenes and takes over the lady’s part to demonstrate some points of technique, Thierry is instantly much less comfortable.  As you watch and admire The Measure of a Man, however, you feel that Stéphane Brizé will, sooner or later, have to make his story (he wrote the screenplay with Olivier Gorce) more eventfully dramatic.  I was conscious both of wanting Brizé to do this and fearing I’d be disappointed as soon as he complicated the narrative’s scrupulous but limited lifelikeness.

In the event, when Brizé first ups the dramatic ante, the result is both shocking and convincing.  We’ve already seen the security staff at the supermarket interviewing suspected shoplifters.  These sequences are compellingly miserable; the mood darkens further when Françoise, the cashier who wrote the farewell song for Gisèle and led the singing of it, is interrogated by the supermarket manager, with Thierry also present.  Françoise is accused of pocketing discount coupons for her own use and, once she realises further lying is fruitless and admits to this, she’s fired.  A scene or two later, the manager, with the supermarket chain’s director of human resources alongside, addresses the staff.  I expected the announcement of further job losses; instead, it’s explained that Françoise – whose domestic circumstances are now acknowledged by management to have been very difficult – has committed suicide.  I was less persuaded by the ending of The Measure of a Man, although the film stopped almost too abruptly for me to register this at the time.  A second female worker at the supermarket is hauled over the coals – this time for crediting other customers’ purchases to her own loyalty card.  Thierry is present again but, before this interview is over, he leaves the room, collects his things from his locker and drives away from the supermarket.  We realise that Thierry has been finding his spying work – spending his days patrolling aisles and watching CCTV screens – increasingly hard to tolerate.  Yet it’s difficult to believe in his impulsive departure – to accept that this deeply responsible family man would simply walk out of a job in a way likely to jeopardise his prospects of finding another.  The ending does, though, expand the meaning of the film’s English title; this is a case where the translated title is an improvement on the original.  Brizé’s more narrowly political ‘The Law of the Market’ conveys his deploring of capitalist exploitation and heartlessness.  ‘The Measure of a Man’ gets across both the sense of how much working-class identity depends on maintaining paid employment and the strength of Thierry’s moral compass.

Vincent Lindon won the Best Actor prize at Cannes this year for his performance as Thierry Taugourdeau.  It’s hard to think the honour has been more deserved on many previous occasions in the Festival’s seventy years.  This is a fine demonstration of one of the hallmarks of great screen acting – the ability to let the audience see things about a character that other characters on the screen aren’t seeing.  (I realise how regularly I insist on this quality but it’s often a sine qua non in film drama.)  With an awareness of the camera so refined that it seems intuitive, Lindon expresses a persistent sense of Thierry’s showing less than he’s feeling, in order to improve the chances of making happen what he desperately needs to happen.  There’s humour in Thierry too, even though it’s hidden under layers of worry and disappointment.  What’s most remarkable about his acting – and Stéphane Brizé’s direction – is how seamlessly Vincent Lindon blends into a cast of non-professionals.  At the same time, he magnetises the viewer and carries the movie.  The Measure of a Man screened at the recent New York Film Festival (as well as the London Film Festival, where I saw it).  In an interview for NYFF, Brizé talked about his casting:

‘I had already filmed non-professional actors in tiny roles, and every time I had the feeling that I was getting closer to a truth – which is what interests me the most in my work. I had to push this system even further by throwing an experienced actor into a cast of non-professionals. The idea was to bring Vincent Lindon to uncharted waters in terms of his acting.  … Many of the roles corresponded to specific jobs: the security guards, the banker, the staff at the unemployment office, the cashiers, etc. Coralie Amédéo, the casting director, first looked for people who worked at the same jobs as their characters.  I was blown away by the people I met.  I doubt they can do what actors do – but I don’t think any actor is capable of doing what they can. It is fascinating to see people walk up to a filmmaker and casting director, in an office they’re completely unfamiliar with, and impose their crude and powerful truth with mind-blowing authority. Where does their ability to completely be themselves in front of a camera come from? It’s a mystery that continues to fascinate me.’

Karine de Mirbeck interprets the role of Thierry’s wife perfectly.  Among the many excellent people playing a work-based alter ego, Françoise Anselmi, as her ill-fated supermarket namesake, is especially remarkable.

10 October 2015