Pay and Suffering By Stephen Hunter Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, September 15, 2000

Jalil Lespert and Jean-Claude Vallod play employees at a French factory. (Shooting Gallery)

Then why are there so few movies about the workplace? Well, maybe it's because we go to movies to get away from it, and we'd prefer to spend our time watching things jiggle or explode.

Now here's the French "Human Resources," written and directed by Laurent Cantet, in which nothing jiggles or explodes but all the vicious twisted dramas of the milieu--office politics, brown-nosing, jealousy, gossip, coup, plot, insurrection, repression and too many bathroom breaks--are chronicled in exquisite detail. Some 85-hour-a-week Washingtonians may wonder: Where does my life end and this movie begin?

The setting is a small metal fixtures factory in provincial France, where sophisticated robotics, guided by computers and an ever-shrinking human staff, churn out what could be the parts of automobiles, guns, airplanes, toilets or kitchen sinks. In other words, you know, stuff (the film purposely keeps the work product almost comically vague).

This workplace is an uneasy battle zone between labor and management, between young and old, between the connected and the unconnected, between the rising and the falling, the almosts, the wannabes and the nevercouldbes, the rude, the intolerant and the embittered. In other words: everywhere.

The fulcrum of the drama is the arrival of a new management intern, a business school student, who will be assigned to the company's human resources department. The complication is that his father is one of the company's oldest employees, that elderly gentleman over there, next to the buzzing, vibrating, sparking fabulous whateverthehellitis machine. He has worked for 30 years in the same spot, grinding out nifty little riveted gimcracks that connect the sprocket to the gasket, or possibly the penumbra to the aura. He is fiercely proud of his riveted gimcracks.

His son's arrival is probably a bad idea: Franck (Jalil Lespert, a Matt Damon look-alike, who is the only professional actor in the production) is in an untenable situation from the get-go, torn between filial loyalty to dad and professional loyalty to the company. That strain is exacerbated when the chief executive (Lucien Longueville, who is so CEO you're afraid he'll gaze out into the audience, looking for dress code violations) takes an immediate shine to him, to the chagrin of his supervisor, the director of human resources, played by Pascal Semard. The director Cantet has a great feel for faces and body types, and unlike most Hollywood filmmakers (who overpopulate their worlds with weathergirl-perfect beauties), he finds people who look like who they are: Semard, for example, conjures instantly the type of executive who has the word "human" in his title and, of course, fears and loathes any and all things human and recoils from flesh as if it's manure. He's familiar from anybody's career: in fact, I think he ran the PIO office at the 3d Infantry 31 years ago, where he made life miserable for poor little Spec. 4 Hunter.

Anyhow, Franck is still so wet behind the years he makes that complete career-catastrophe commitment to the idea that he can please everyone. He can get everybody to agree! Everybody will like him! He'll be the champion!

The issue is a 35-hour work week that the company is trying to implement, while the communist union fights it, seeing it as a way to get as much work out of the workers while paying them for five fewer hours a week. It's Franck's brainstorm to go around the union by polling the workers directly and assembling a survey of what they want. He doesn't quite get that this is called "union busting."

It makes his career and leads to an offer of permanent employment and the ardent sponsorship of the influential CEO; and of course, it infuriates everyone, and when as a next move, the CEO and the human resources director use his survey as justification to fire employees (guess which old guy is on the list) Franck has to answer the question posed by the old labor song: Which side are you on? The only incorrect answer is the only one he yearns desperately to give: both.

Soon enough a protest becomes a work stoppage becomes a full-blown bitter strike, at which point, crushed by the mess his good intentions have caused, Franck returns to school.

Though it has aspects of farce, and though indeed most workplace films--"9 to 5," "Working Girl,"--are comedies, "Human Resources" is far from an amusing romp. That's its strength, but also its weakness. Shot in a deadpan pseudo-documentary style, without "fictional" attributes like witty dialogue, beautiful women, noble characters or heroic rhetoric, it has that real-life feel of some of Mike Leigh's bitter works.

Its ultimate evocation of very messy labor troubles is particularly pungent. If you've been through those bits of nastiness called strikes, you'll recognize the terrain and typology instantly, the secret turn-on of the drama and the color of the conflict that everybody feels--the sheer fun of it. You'll also recognize the suspiciously too fervid unionistas who take out their career anger on the company that hasn't recognized their brilliance, the executives turned sociopathic by the threat to their way of life and the dazed little people in the middle who cannot figure out what they fear most: losing the strike or losing their jobs.

It makes one point over and over, which is that despite one's biases toward either management or labor, we can agree on one thing: Making a living is hard work. That's why they call them jobs.

HUMAN RESOURCES (NR, 100 minutes) – Contains strong emotional content.