Those Who
Work aka Ceux Qui Travaillent, written by Emmanuel Marre and Antoine Russbach, directed
by the latter
Nine out of
10
This formidable
motion picture seems to have been largely missed by critics and audiences
alike, which is more than a shame, given that the story is relevant, poignant, inspirational,
deep and the performance of Olivier Gourmet is magnificent…the actor has had a
series of fabulous roles, in great films like L’Exercice de L’Etat - http://realini.blogspot.com/2019/05/lexercice-de-letat-written-and-directed.html
- Read My Lips aka Sur Mes Levres - http://realini.blogspot.com/2017/07/read-my-lips-aka-sur-mes-levres-written.html
- or Sage Femme aka The Midwife -
Olivier Gourmet
is Frank, one of Those Who Work, in charge of logistics for a shipping company
under pressure from the competition, apparently their vessels are getting
older, the margins are quite small, there are incidents that delay the
deliveries for all those consumer goods that the world keeps craving for – in one
memorable scene, Frank takes his adorable, daughter, a wonderfully talented
five year old – probably five – to a supermarket, on the day when children have
to see their parents at their jobs, to a supermarket, where he tells her that
everything she sees is the result of the Work of many people, the fish fingers
and all the rest do not just drop out of the sky, they have to be shipped,
transported all the way to this place…and this is what he does, he takes care
of this and tries to allow each and every one to have access to want they want
and need…on a side note, the Dalai Lama is supposed to have walked into a hypermarket
and said…’Wow, so many things I do not need’, exposing one of the major
maladies of the century – the accumulation of mostly useless stuff
Near the
beginning, Frank is called upon to solve a crisis that takes place aboard one
of the ships under his supervision, where an illegal immigrant had climbed
aboard, and they discovered him, the captain called the one in charge, who
considered this for a minute or two, scolded the captain and told him to
return, have the official on the African shore take a bribe and get the
intruder off, for the other alternative, of sailing into an European port to be
quarantined, have the merchandise trapped and the cost augment with a couple of
hundreds of thousands of dollars would be too bad for the profits of the
company, as he would underline in a faceoff with superiors, later on, when the
moment of confrontation would come…
When he
receives a call from his wife, unable to take their youngest daughter from
school, because she is with her mother at a nursing home, frank calls from his
car – a super expensive Porsche SUV, with a top of the range engine, capable in
spite of the huge mass to reach 100 kilometers per hour in three seconds – and changes
the plan and the itinerary for the ship with the immigrant, explaining that
this was the problem of the captain and crew, in a furious state mentioning
that they have about fifty cameras on board and they still somehow managed to
botch this and he would not have the stupid acts of another affect him plus many
other words to that effect, which conclude with the decision to ask the commandant
to return to the initial itinerary, forget about the delay and the first reaction
and to ‘get rid of the young man’…offering the captain $ 60,000 to do this, augmented
with two and then three thousand dollars for each of the members of the crew,
something the commandant accepts eventually, though he had refused initially…
This act,
basically the order to execute a young man, would have consequences, first when
the board of the company calls Frank to explain to them what happened, for they
saw that one of their vessels had stopped on the way to Europe, returned and
then continued, and when they confront each other, the decision maker is told they
have procedures in place and he should have followed them, though he has a
retort that puts them to shame – ‘you say you care, but when you transport
cereal, you do not pay for the needed cleaning of the containers…’words to that
effect and furthermore, we would later learn, together with the now depressed,
pressured protagonist, that the company had anyway planned to dismiss him and
the incident on the ocean was just the occasion, probably the pretext…
While the
family still enjoys what looks like a rather luxurious life style, with the
Porsche, the swimming pool and very high expenses, large bills for the phones, which
need emergency replacing when they have fallen – this causes one of the breakdowns
of the Working Man, who would crash the cellular when his son demands another one,
even if this worked just fine – Frank does not say a word about him being
unemployed, joins a sort of seminar where we see what he answers for his psychological
profile…he is not communicative, intrepid, prefers to go it alone, he is not
social, but would Work Hard – he seems to have had working days of twelve hours
at his previous job – and he is able to fix things…
In the
round circle where people with work related problems confess their secret worries
and the issues they have to face, much like alcoholic anonymous presumably, the
main character hesitates to open up and tells the others that he comes from a
farm, where children were treated like animals, with severe beatings and where
nobody was expected to talk about pain, problems…later, at the family dinner,
he would tell the story of the local drunk, who came to their house one
evening, when Frank was only about five, he could barely reach for the table to
get a glass, for the local alcoholic asked for a glass of wine, then another
and after that, he wanted some ham…the problem with the ham was that each could
only have a slice on a single day of the week and with this intruder there, he
got the ham down and giving the child some slices, once in a while, they
finished it between them and when the brothers came – they were all older –
they gave him a beating so hard as to reflect what they were going to miss for
a long, long time…
The manager
from a rival company calls Frank and says he has heard he is available and they
should have a talk, which takes place at his office, where he claims, looking
at a small replica of one of their container ships on the table, that this was
named after the child of one employee – Claire or Clothilde, he cannot remember
in the first place – in an effort to highlight how close they are with their
team members – which is so much bullshit, for this man is evil in the extreme –
and then tries to engage Frank in a
conversation about their competitors, how they have older ships, they
will have lost it in about a couple of years, but why is it that after twenty
years and a phenomenal ascension thorough the ranks Frank decides suddenly to
leave…what is it that made him go…and when Frank is clearly not going to say
more, expect that he does not feel secrets should be thrown out, this SOB just
stands up and is about to walk out…
When the candidate
asks about the job…the reply is ‘what job, Frank…what job? Making it clear that
this was just a phony situation, an attempt to squeeze out any industrial
secret they could get, with no true offer on the table, humiliating the man who
had just been praised on his career, started as just a worker in a warehouse,
followed by climbing every step of the ladder, near the position of partner, which
should have been his anyway…all an empty praise concocted just to fool him and
milk him out for whatever he would allow to get out…
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