Zero Fucks Given

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.

After losing a parent, your mother, you take to the skies to recover, as a hostess you fly, on occasion you cry, it's the way that you choose to recover. Your colleagues are generally fine, although there's some who live in the guidelines, they appear quite austere, just for drinking a beer, acts of kindness not desired by this airline. You get your kicks in a number of ways, from a bottle, from a pill, from men plays, but the truth is you're stuck, in a perpetual rut, there are better ways to spend these long days.

You have to feel for poor old Cassandre Wassels but I lost interest half way through and that was when the title of this piece resonated most, still a good performance from Adèle Exarchopoulos however.

Wow, what a fantastic, natural film of everyday life. It has the feel of a Belgium Mike Leigh film with the acting on the same par, and I imagine, a similar improvisation technique. The lead actor, who i have since seen was the youngest recipient of the Palme D'or, was amazing and gave such an outstanding performance. But, pretty much everyone was so believable it had an almost documentary feel. I'd ignore the ludicrous 1/10 marks as there are people who obviously have an ulterior motive. Maybe Michael O'Leary thought it was a little too close for comfort.

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.