En guerra

The title says it all. "At War".

Stephane Brizé's film is a hard-hitting and uncompromising portrayal of workers whose lives are literally hammered by the grotesque peculiarities of capitalism. It is even more relevant since it was released a few months before the yellow vests revolt in France, and it almost predicted the crucial role of the 'battle of image' with the ambivalent assistance of the media. When there's war, there's conflict and it evolves on three levels.

First, you have the workers of the Perrin Industry in Agen, a factory about to be closed for lack of economical viability, a state of fact that not only contradicts a promise made by the management but also the insolent increasing of the company's stock value. The establishing moment of Laurent (union leader) shows him daring the boss to go tell his workers that they're going to lose their job while the company's making profits.

Then following a funnel-like structure, there's the internal conflict between the two major union forces: one that insists on meeting the German CEO and the other which is more pragmatic and would rather negotiate the number in the redundancy check. It's literally a Cornelian dilemma: one between passion and reason, which in that psychological arm-wrestling is translated into desperation vs. Defeatism.

Finally, we get a glimpse on conflicts within people who question the futility of everything: the more they raise their voice, the less they're heard, the less they're heard, the more inclined to violence... and if not listened to, they're seen and exposed by the treacherous cameras. That's the vicious circle of violence, the more you're willing to fight, the more likely you are to lose because your determination must be contained in a spectrum of conveniences and curtesy that is almost obscene in that context.

But the tone is set already with that quote from Bertold Brecht: those who fight might lose, those who don't have already lost. That's it. The remaining question is: is it a fair game or is it rigged? Brizé doesn't surrender to pessimism but simply uses documentary-style realism and 'fake' news report to depict the escalation of the situation. We get to more private moments where the union traders plan their communication strategies. It doesn't take long before the "divide to rule" principle is evoked during one of these heated meetings.

But the first conflict, while not the subtlest one, is the most spectacular... and infuriating. It's truly two worlds colliding at each other. And there's something rotten in a state when you have a clean-cut well-dressed rosy-cheeked Human Resources yuppie telling worn-down workers that they can't even meet one man. Sure, you can ask for the mayor to help or a President's representative but the state can't interfere with economical freedom. It all leads to the first misstep where they all refuse to leave the headquarters are pushed by security guards. People who want to move forward and being held back. The perfect analogy.

Now I could talk about Vincent Lindon, once again brilliant in the film after having played the unemployed guy in "The Measure of a Man". I could also mention Mélanie Rover, but listing the cast isn't the pont, not even for Lindon. The film is about the collective force and Brizé did the right thing by never going into their private lives except for a few moments where Laurent watches pictures of his pregnant daughter (calling him "her hero") or where Melanie says that her boyfriend (or husband) isn't very implicated in the fight and is more annoyed to take charge of everything. The rest of the individual struggles are alluded to during the internal arguments where we discover that Laurent isn't even the most in trouble, but he's got principles.

And boy are principles shaken in this conflict! There's a lot of noise and anger and disbelief displayed in the film that it's a miracle there's no incident. But there's a fine line between knowing anger is detrimental to the cause and not falling in the trap. And since we're put in the worker's shoes, having to endure the patronizing mumbo-jumbo of well-educated men and women who "hear what they say" but their hands are tied, it's hard not to full into insanity... and anger is truly a brief madness.

It's a dialogue of the deaf where the winner is the one who doesn't snap. The irony is that the more workers you have, the more likely you are to have troublemakers or traitors or 'breakers'. I read once that a group that counts more than 100 or 150 elements is more vulnerable because you can't control more persons (that's what Romans had centuries). You can't even listen to more than three people talking.

On that level, Brizé proves again a master storyteller by the way he plunges us in long and interminable interactions where people talk the same time and you can barely hear them, but that does happen in real life, doesn't it? The impression of chaos and cacophony is obviously deliberate and renders perfectly the vulnerability of union. All it took was one incident that would give an excuse for the government to "denounce violence in all its forms". They know the drift.

I am not sure it needed that ending that looked like a gratuitous downer, I understand the motives behind it and the shock value but the realism of "At War" was beyond that and the ending kind of made the Manichean angle a little more forced. Apart from that miscalculation from Brizé and his screenwriter Olivier Gorce, I applaud the film's boldness and honest portrayal of the workers' struggle, even more difficult in our media-driven world.

"At War" is a sort of modern-day cinematic "Germinal" that proves that ever since Zola's "J'Accuse" things haven't changed much.