Valérie Donzelli has given us a strange mixture of realism and quaint naivety in this film, based on an autobiographical novel by French photographer turned novelist Franck Courtès. There are some interesting insights into the gig economy but some very cliched and implausible representations of what happens when you become a literary author.
With a kind of unvarying bland placidity, Bastien Bouillon plays someone who (like Courtès) abandoned a very successful career in photography in pursuit of his financially perilous dream of being a serious writer. We get a single shot early on of all his cameras on a shelf: he presumably does not sell any to alleviate his financial difficulties but we never see or hear about these valuable objects ever again.
Bouillon has already had what the French call succès d’estime with some well-reviewed but low-selling books, and his publisher (Virginie Ledoyen) says he needs to get some serious sales; she is unenthusiastic about his new manuscript and refuses to advance him any more money. Bouillon’s wife and kids have moved out, a situation he accepts with the same undemonstrative blankness as everything else. So he is forced to move to a cheaper place and do piecemeal labour to pay the bills while he works listlessly on his magnum opus; he deliberately chooses menial, meaningless work to ringfence the dignity of his new vocation as a serious author. He never quite answers the question of why he doesn’t just do literary-adjacent work such as teaching. Perhaps his pride will not permit him.
So using a Taskrabbit-type website on which workers must humiliatingly undercut each other in bidding to do various manual-labour jobs for low fees, he scrapes a depressing living. But with an awful inevitability, he turns out to be writing a heartwarming book about what this existence is like, with vignettes of all these micro-employers, which is naturally entitled At Work. Did Courtès really submit a miscellaneous bunch of handwritten notebooks to his publisher for this – not typing it himself, no agent, nothing like that? Did he really continue to do online gig work even after it was published?
Well, maybe: although his film deal surely means this era is at an end. It is a novel and a fiction feature after all, and neither are, as they say, on oath with the details. Either way, the film, though eventful enough, does not quite succeed in its tacit claim to be a study of poverty; the author behaves like a student who is stoically accepting some temporary dodgy accommodation.
• At Work screened at the Venice film festival.
