Alice is 26 years old. She's a goods handler in a fish factory in Boulogne sur Mer. One day, she is fired for economic reasons. Obviously, this piece of news makes her sad but she doesn't get discouraged for all that. She decides to leave and to start a new life again in Lyon. So, she momentarily settles in a hotel there where she meets several people who support her thanks to their kindness and affection. Among them, there's Bruno, a young man at a loss who doesn't take a long time falling in love with her.
For her first appearance in the cinema as a film-maker, Laetitia Masson decided to look into one of the major plagues in the end of the twentieth century: unemployment. Certain aspects of her film evoke Ken Loach's cinema (who would have maybe appreciated it unless he already watched it) and it stands out in a positive way. Unlike many movies which from a dark social reality weave a bleak and miserable atmosphere, this one conveys human warmth and comfort thanks to the characters' good mood and liking (especially the ones in the hotel that we can consider as a sort of refuge) and enables to believe in a better future. Besides, Alice's character is of an exemplary courage. It's true, she isn't very much skilled, she's not sure about the future but she doesn't accept to be a loser and not to sink in despair is ready to accept any job to manage herself (Sandrine Kiberlain is a real revelation and it's with this film that her career as an actress really began). The optimism towards which the film tends finds its best example in the last sequences since Alice has found a job as a waitress and shares a flat with her new boyfriend Bruno.
"En avoir (ou pas)" is a sunbeam in a very cloudy sky, the flick that shows the way towards optimism for all the movies dealing with unemployment and if one day, you find yourself in a situation similar to Alice, try to follow her example. Anything goes and as Coldplay said in their album "Parachutes" (2000): "everything's not lost...".
