| HUMAN RESOURCES Director: Laurent Cantet "The title 'Human Resources' is a reaction against the cynicism of that expression. A human being is administered the same way you would administer stocks or capital. I wanted to play on that double meaning and go beyond coded adminstative lingo in order to talk about an actual human's resource's" Laurent Cantet ‘Human Resources’ usually refers to the department that deals with employee relations (i.e. they hire and fire them), but taken literally it means dealing with the resources that make us human. This powerful French film (as the director states above) clearly means to use the term ironically with a slight leaning toward the latter definition. Frank (Jalil Lespert) comes home from Business College to work a summer internship in the Management office with the same company that employs his father (Jean-Claude Vallod) as a worker. Right from the start Human Resources sets up the contentious scenario of father versus son, but it’s a credit to the intelligence of the script, by Laurent Cantet, that it doesn’t follow a plot line that you expect it to. At first, it marches along a predictable path. Frank impresses the boss and immediately is offered a position in the company. His father -- who has worked for 30 years in the factory -- is proud of him even though it clearly means they will be on either side of the divide. Frank helps the company by coming up with a plan to implement a 35-hours work week, but what he doesn’t realize is that the boss is using his ideas to get good leverage against the union, which opposes the plan, and to justify layoffs. The film takes a dramatic turn when Frank learns that, with his crafty factory-downsizing plan, his father may be in line to lose his job. Now he is faced with a moral dilemma: should he stick with management or should he help his father and the workers -- which means supporting the union and certainly losing his new job? Adding to the difficulty of the decision is that Frank’s father -- a stubbornly quiet man who has sacrificed his life for the success of his son -- cares more about his son working for management than he does about losing a job he’s had all his life. Adding another wrinkle to the drama is that the father is unwilling to join the union and fight for himself. Director/ writer Laurent Cantet keeps the drama powerfully convincing because he doesn’t manipulate the high drama with music (the movie has no score) or with bogus melodrama. Also, unlike many leftist filmmakers, he doesn’t clearly draw lines making the workers saintly, liberals and the management demonic, conservatives. He is more interested in the human drama that develops between the father and the son and because of this, by the end, the film becomes a very emotionally effective working-class drama. Matt Langdon |
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