If At Work had made 50 years ago it would likely have been a bawdy sex comedy — Confessions of a Handyman — but in today’s world there is next to no fun to be had from the world of no-strings employment. Weirdly, Valérie Donzelli’s film is dour even by those standards; there are more laughs in Ken Loach’s last three films on much the same subject. It also takes a very strange stance on modern employment ethics, being the story of a man who could very well earn good money if he wanted to, but chooses instead to lurk in the margins, where he happily undercuts working people who don’t have the safety net that he does.
That man is Paul Marquet (Bastien Bouillon), and when we first meet him, he is tearing down a wall. It’s a crucial point in his life; his partner (played by Donzelli herself) is leaving him and moving to Montréal with their two nearly grown-up children. Her reasons for leaving are never quite clarified, but it’s clearly something to do with the fact that Paul has recently quit a fairly well-paid life as a freelance photographer and opted instead to become a novelist, selling off some very expensive cameras to pay for the privilege.
Although he gets fan mail, Paul’s writing career is not terribly auspicious, and with his third novel it’s coming to crunch time with his long-suffering publishers at Gallimard. Unfortunately for Paul, he’s running out of road there; his new book is a not terribly veiled roman à clef about his failed marriage, titled The Story of an End. His publisher Alice (Virginie Ledoyen) tries to be diplomatic about its downbeat nature. “Don’t you read the news?” she asks, quietly exasperated. “Every ten minutes it’s the apocalypse.” People want escapism, she tells him. Worse than that, it isn’t even very good. “I’m waiting for your great novel,” she says, finally. “And this isn’t it?” he wonders. (Reader, it is not.)
So, at the ripe old age of 42, and much to his family’s disgust, Paul takes up the life of the artist, leaving (presumably rent-free) in his aunt’s surprisingly sizable studio flat in a suburb of Paris. But how can a struggling writer pay the bills? It’s a conundrum that comes up when he visits an employment agency. “I’ll take anything,” he tells them, as long as he can write. “You want a job that leaves you spare time,” comes the sarcastic response.
Quite frankly, there are many jobs that leave writers free to write, but Paul skips the obvious bar, club and Uber shifts by signing up for a website called Jobber. Jobber is a kind of community service site with no apparent upside for the worker; people post their odd jobs and the site’s client base pitch for each gig with the lowest possible tender. It’s a cutthroat world, and yet Paul seems to embrace that, which is how he comes to join a band of immigrant workers doing home improvements in the film’s opening scene.
As if to pre-empt our judgments, Donzelli introduces Paul’s father (Andre Marcon), who doesn’t seem to have a name. Paul’s father is the righteous wrath of society, looking down on his son’s fecklessness with the zealotry of an irascible Fox News addict who doesn’t see any value at all in arts funding. Paul doesn’t even really stand up for himself on this point; his — and the film’s central thesis — is that literature just is worthwhile. And from this point on, At Work sets on its very predictable path, putting Paul on a journey that will see him turn his dreary adventures on the breadline into passages of pure alchemical gold.
That journey, however — as compelling it may have sounded in Franck Courtès novel, on which this is based — is incredibly dull and, at times, really rather patronizing to people who are actually poor (a contradiction the script tries to address but never quite manages). Donzelli’s choices have a lot to do with that, over-indulging her composer and over-estimating her leading man’s onscreen charisma to such an extent that even when he kills and guts a deer it’s about as exciting as the time he tries to mow a woman’s lawn with a pair of garden shears. The French are normally pretty good with this type of stuff — the dignity of labor and all that — but At Work is hard to engage with, and it seems awfully small in Competition at Venice when a smaller berth would easily have sufficed.
Title: At Work
Festival: Venice (Competition)
Director: Valérie Donzelli
Screenwriters: Valérie Donzelli and Gilles Marchand, based on the novel by Franck Courtès
Cast: Bastien Bouillon, André Marcon, Virginie Ledoyen
Sales agent: Kinology
Running time: 1 hr 32 mins