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I wrote a little something on French director Louis-Julien Petit for the editorial of the upcoming issue of Film International, that I thought my be of interest to some. I highly recommend his films, if you haven’t already discovered them: Frenchman Louis-Julien Petit (born 1983) is a filmmaker worthy of more attention. His third feature as director, Invisibles (Les Invisibles), was released generally in France in January of this year and is still making its tentative way onto select international screens, opening in Germany in October. After graduating film school in 2004, Petit started out as assistant director (first, second, third, credited, uncredited…) on some 30 films, including the romantic anthology movie Paris, je t’aime (2006), Quentin Tarantino’s World War Two saga Inglorious Basterds (2009) and Martin Scorsese’s family fairytale Hugo Cabret (2011). But Petit’s own films have little in common with these glamorous fantasies. Instead, they straddle two interlinked traditions of French and European ‘political’ cinema (‘political’ here standing for critical of liberal capitalism, while films whose explicit and/or implicit assumptions, regarding humans, societies and history, are consistent with liberal ideology are generally seen as neutrally ‘unpolitical’): on the one hand, the ‘political thriller’ of the 1960s and 70s, exemplified by, say, the work of Claude Chabrol or the today wildly underrated Yves Boisset; on the other hand, the later social realist cinema made by the likes of Robert Guédiguian and the Belgian Dardenne Brothers. Moving between thriller and social realism, between comedic exuberance and deep tragedy, mixing professional actors and amateurs portraying characters close to their own life experiences, and focussing on the struggle of the most precarious layers of the working class, Petit’s as yet small body of films reminds us perhaps most of all of the doyen of contemporary European social realist cinema, Ken Loach, while the work of Petit’s compatriot, Laurent Cantet, ticks several of these boxes as well. Petit’s first film, Discount (2014), took years to complete and was partly crowdfunded. The premise of the story is similar to that of the Dardennes’ film of the same year, Two Days, One Night (Deux jours, une nuit): a company plans to downsize and the workers are set to compete against each other to decide who gets to keep their jobs. In Petit’s film, a chain of supermarkets, Discount, is about to introduce self-checkout to cut labour costs. To find out who are the most efficient workers, the security guards are equipped with stop-watches and made to double as time study men. Every moment of work is carefully measured and upper time limits are set for such things as toilet breaks; 75 seconds for men, 95 for women (on account of menstruation). The response of the workers in Discount, however, is more Loach than Dardennes. They can’t afford to strike, but they band together and fight back, opening their own discount store in an abandoned barn, where they sell the out-of-date, but perfectly fine, goods that it is part of their daily work to destroy. Selling cheaply to friends and neighbours, they split the proceeds equally and so make sure they get at least a bit of severance pay. But what sets Discount apart from mainstream social realism is its moments of a distinctly modernist aesthetic touch, connecting it to the ‘Brecthian’ distanciation and experimental edginess of 1970s political thrillers. At times, Petit displays the supermarket – with its ubiquitous surveillance system and invisible corporate bosses communicating via instruction films teaching middle-management how to fire people ‘responsibly’ – as an totalitarian machine that has turned on its human creators, not unlike Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Some critics – idealist purists, as so many critics are – faulted Petit for this aesthetic ‘inconsistency’, but it created a powerful image of the conflict between the irrational corporate system’s superficial ‘rationality’ and the needs of humanity. Petit’s second film, Carole Matthieu (2016), was based on a roman noir (something of the literary twin of the political thriller) by Marin Ledun (Les Visages écrasés, 2011). In writing the novel, Ledun was inspired by the wave of suicides provoked by the horrific working conditions at his former employer, France Télécom. In order to downsize, the company fostered a culture of harassment to drive employees out, one way or another. As then chief executive Didier Lombard put it in a speech to managers in 2007: ‘I will cut these jobs one way or another. By the window or by the door’ (Schofield 2019). Carole Matthieu stars a magnificent Isabelle Adjani as a company doctor (Matthieu) at a call centre, fighting a hopeless fight against the physical and mental wreckage caused by systematic bullying and constant surveillance. Gradually, Matthieu herself becomes another victim. A brutal, glacial nightmare, whose characters are far too broken, far too deprived of their self-esteem, to fight back and instead turn against themselves, the film nevertheless seeths with a rage that counters the hopeless despair of the story, a trait typical of both the political thriller and the roman noir. Invisibles is a step in the opposite direction, almost toward the kind of feelgood social comedy of films like Brassed Off (1996) or The Full Monty (1997). It tells the story of a day centre for homeless women and the struggle of its clients and personnel to keep it open in the age of eternal austerity. Many of the clients are portrayed by amateurs who have themselves experienced homelessness and they all – every single one – give amazing performances making the film into a true ensemble piece that manages effectively to give real depth to an impressive number of characters in its 102 minutes. Returning visibility, dignity and the potential for agency to the image of those who are so often either ignored or humiliated for our pleasure in the contemporary media landscape, while infusing something of the analytical tradition of the classical political thriller into modern social realism, Petit’s films are glimpses of a badly needed renewal in French cinema. _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
