Zero Fucks Given

Here we have such an elegant - and true to its name - production. Essential direction (a first feature) with original camerawork, clean and colorful photography, postmodern medley music. Yet acting and especially the screenplay are top notch: there, lots of "fucks" are given.

Character study of a young lost soul and profession study of flight attendants (eye opening for all those not used to how complex multinational business organizations may manage their HR).

Despite its qualities you're warned: not really entertaining except for very few sparks here and there especially towards the end of the movie (the scene where the sisters talk with their dad was so touching I had to cry). Indeed mostly thought provoking, uncomfortable and a little slow (had to watch it at 1,25x) yet one of the best dramas of 2021 (I haven't watched "Murina" who won in the same category at Cannes, but I doubt this will be topped).

I might be a little biased since I find A. Exarchopoulos to be outrageously sensual - maybe it's more of an 8... but I swear I can give her movies low votes as well... Looking forward to the next Lecoustre/Marre's endeavours.

This film about a young woman without any particular ambition working as a flight attendant was extremely real. It felt like a secret camera was just recording a month in the life of a few people working for the fictional Wing discount airline. The acting was terrific, and made the story feel completely believable.

I mostly enjoyed the aspects of the film that related to labor relations at her airline: how they pushed the cabin crew to be salespeople, underpaid them, & treated them like crap. There is a chance, here, for our main character to get involved with this storyline when she meets a picket line of her co-workers, but she waves off the union effort to improve conditions with a nihilistic, "nothing matters, nothing changes".

Our main character also has a chance to express something, to *do* something interesting around the death of her mother. But she doesn't. She keeps her pain bundled inside, as many of us do in the real world, and just carries on.

This character's life is boring because SHE is boring and lacks any compelling motivation. The film successfully illustrates that to the audience.

But being 100% "true-to-life" is NOT entertaining, unless the life in question is entertaining. There are millions of people in the world living non-ambitious lives worth repetitive jobs...and I don't want to watch a long-form film about each of them.

In this case, the writers and directors seem to have gone out of their way to illustrate how monotone this woman's life was. It is a symphony concert written with one note played over and over. It was "aggressively mundane", which is artistic, but *still* boring.

I'm really not sure why IMDB categorises this as both a drama and a "comedy". There are precious few laughs here.

Instead, we see the relentless grind of a low-end job in a budget airline, with sales targets and ever-present management oversight - not to mention the usual challenges of dealing with the passengers. There are "R&R" interludes of course but even some of these look pretty joyless, as will resonate with any business traveller who has been stuck for a few hours in a supposedly "exotic" location with nothing much to do. Maybe it's all scripted, but many of the rambling interchanges here sound amateurish and improvised - perhaps deliberately to emphasise the feeling?

Adele fortunately is charismatic enough to carry pretty much the whole film single-handedly, although some of the supporting players are not too bad either, and the exploration of the home life from which she has run away adds to the overall picture of aimlessness.

The ending is nicely balanced, I think, and can be read either way ... is she on the verge of achieving a dream, or just switching one kind of drifting for another? Sartre would empathise, I feel.

Worth a look.

This is a film about the dehumanisation and Robotisation of humanity of the workforce after 40 years of neoliberalism.

It shows the workers of a bucket price airline being treated like automatons By management hired fired manipulated indoctrinated in whichever way increases profits for the shareholders.

It is a profound indictment of neoliberal capitalism and it is done extremely well.

The main actress Adele is so gifted and so charismatic that although the scenes depicted are about as fascinating as watching paint dry she still manages to instill life and emotion into this Death culture too many of the younger generations now think is normal life.

It is not easy viewing or comfortable and probably the source for some of the negative reviews here which seem to totally miss the point the reason the Raison D'Etre for this Opus

In some ways I cannot really describe it reminds one of the early efforts of the Nouvelle Vague in 1960s France.

It contains social reality depiction done in a clinical quasi-surgical Manner.

If you are interested at all in the way humanity is being turned into a farming pen for transhuman robots this is the film for you.

The comedy tag some have given needs to be qualified with the proviso that it is of the driest type.

It is not comedy it is a lucid indictment of the place we have collectively got to and that we need to get away from as quickly as we can if we want to remain human.

Yet the main actress manages at times to infuse humanity into some of the scenes.

The backdrop though Perforce will always remain sterile, boring, uninteresting, nihilistic, biocidal, doomed, headed to nowhere.

In the end I loved the film. It starts off as a rather offputting look into the culture of a cheap airline. Cassandre seems willingly lost in a job she does not enjoy; at times the film seems almost a satire. Then slowly the focus shifts and the backstory of her escape becomes the main focus. She is still grieving a loss and unable to let go.

I love the authentic way the Adèle delivers the inner emotions of Cassandre. The moment when Cassandre fails to hold a 30 second smile in a corporate course; or the call with the mobile operator are simply touching.