La loi du marché (The Measure of a Man)
✮✮✮1/2
Starring: Vincent Lindon
Directed by: Stéphane Brizé
Running time: 93 minutes
Times are tough for Thierry. The 51-year-old has been unemployed for 15 months, with no end in sight. He has just gone through a training session that proved to be a waste of time, as it still didn’t qualify him for the construction job he was after. The agent at the employment office can offer only empty apologies. Their conversation goes in circles.
That’s the opening scene of Stéphane Brizé’s La loi du marché (The Measure of a Man), a social-realist drama that paints a bleak picture of the labour market. The film premièred in competition at Cannes last year — the first of the director’s six features to do so — earning Vincent Lindon the best-actor award for his portrayal of Thierry.
Lindon’s performance is a master class in restraint and internalizing emotion. In this case, it’s the soul-sucking exasperation at being robbed of the means to support one’s family. Thierry has a wife and a developmentally challenged teenage son, who offer solace from the outside world while at the same time being causes of concern.
Thierry (Vincent Lindon) eventually gets a job as a mall security guard, but that doesn’t solve all his problems.
Shot at close range, with the camera lingering in awkward, frustrating or simply mundane situations, Brizé’s film focuses on the details of a series of alienating exchanges.
A meeting with disgruntled ex-employees of the company he used to work for gets heated as some push for taking legal action while Thierry maintains that he just wants to move on with his life.
A Skype interview with an unseen prospective employer becomes increasingly disheartening as Thierry is debased in various ways before finally being told that there is only the slimmest of chances he will get the job anyway.
Having made the difficult decision to sell their mobile home, he and his wife meet a couple of interested buyers who take lowballing to new depths.
Thierry finally gets a job as a security guard in a mall, but that doesn’t quite make everything better. It’s mind-numbing work, in which he’s forced to participate in confrontations with shoplifters and even his co-workers.
It is here that Brizé’s film begins to really get under our skin. Without naming it, the director plunges us into the integrity-challenging reality of working for a company that only cares about its bottom line.
