Rien à foutre

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.

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 itself, its a women on the labour market socialrealismic flick, and its directly a story about the life of work of a female flight attendant of the 2020's. It gives you a raw incision into a craft that may give a lot of pleasures and fun, at the same time your just as the wailing wall of jerusalem, a job where the customer is right in 99.999% of the time, where mind and temper control is always at high gear, and the company managment appears to considering you as a cattle in a farmers sales fare, with managers at different levels just there to squeeze out the last drop of honesty and efforts, to try to survive in the second most popular profession in the world amongst girls, where the wages and work hours are so depressed due to a surge of ''3rd world'' low wages employees, making all kinds of organizing in trade unions hardly impossible, and where the threat of being sacked in promptu hangs like a hammer over your head...at the same time as being satisfied with ones job aint enough, and where the lack of wishing promotion is considered a maligne disease by todays managers( its very much the same in the medical nursing profession that ive belonged to for 3 generations, where the rush for specialised continued education is a must rather than a wish, often paid by yourself, that leads to financial ruin for the latter part of your working life. I got shell shocked when working on my bachelor exam, and promised myself to never ever putting myself in such a situation once again!!!)

its definately not a comedy, and not erotic in the sense you might want, even though the main actress is a beauty in one of a kind, it will oppose and include you into the desperation and limbo that this young woman undergoes. Its a powerful critizism towards the feverish globalisation weve undergone in the past 30 years and the makers of this movie did a good job ,making you speculate afterwards how this story will move on.

So if your in for a realistic take of a maneating trade, then do watch rien a foutre, a grumpy old mans recommend.

In an IRL filming technique I could very much believe this is how it is to be a flight attendant/cabin master. Speaking as a friend of a Pilot of a low budget airline in the USA, the stories he told me of how it is for real. After work during a few days layover they would have leftover mini alcohol bottles and he would drink and play video games online, then sober up and fly the next day. As far as the instagram fabulous life they portray, it seems that way but not really. I feel this movie really captured it all in a behind the scenes irl style even if it is scripted.

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.