How fascinating to compare this French movie from Stéphane Brizé with Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake, which won this year’s Palme d’Or at Cannes. Both are about unemployment and poverty, welfare bureaucracy and the struggle to stay afloat. Where Loach’s film had an uncompromising simplicity and a crusading anger, Brizé’s movie is more indirect. Both are about the hoop-jumping indignities of getting state aid in exchange for interview applications and CV-enhancement classes that everyone knows aren’t any use. Yet the difference resides materially in the lead performances. Where Dave Johns was ingenuous in Loach’s film, Vincent Lindon is here withdrawn and closed off, his emotions hidden behind a gentle, kindly but careworn manner. His inner agonies have to be discerned and teased out. He is Thierry, who is laid off from his machinist job, endures the ordeal of benefits application and then miraculously lands a role as a supermarket security guard, with the secret brief of spying on his underperforming co-workers. It’s like collaborating with the invader. This is a film whose subtleties and nuances accumulate; Lindon’s performance won him the best actor award at Cannes in 2015, and it was well deserved. A tough, clear-sighted, compassionate film.
