The measure of a man, Stéphane Brizé, 93′, France 2015
At the age of 51 and after 20 months on unemployment, Thierry starts a new job that will bring him to face a moral dilemma. How much is he willing to give up, in order to keep his job?
Cinema Primavera, wednesday 27th april 16.30, wednesday 27th april 19.00
Title The measure of a man (La Loi du Marché)
Duration 93′
Year 2015
Country France
Genre Drama
Lingua French
Subtitles Italian
Direction Stéphane Brizé
Screenplay Stéphane Brizé, Olivier Gorce
DOP Éric Dumont
Sound Emmanuelle Villard
Editing Anne Klotz
Sound Editing Hervé Guyader
Cast Vincent Lindon, Mathieu Schaller, Karine Petit de Mirbeck
Production Nord-Ouest Films, Arte France Cinéma (co-produzione)
Distribution Academy Two
Festival Cannes 2015
Awards Palme d’or, César and Prix Lumiére to Vincent Lindon as best male leading actor
Synopsis
Aged 51, with a all-depending wife and a disabled son, Thierry hasn’t been working for more than a year and a half. After a long and humiliating research, he finally gets a job as a security guard in a superstore. Working among old shoplifters and dishonest cashiers, his ethics will be challenged by the necessity of keeping the job.
Director’s Statement
My films have always narrated very intimate stories. I didn’t consider indispensable linging on the social environment, where the characters were situated.
Successively I’ve started watching the brutality of mechanisms and dominant relationships inside our world, superimposing the humanity of a vulnerable man without job security with the violence of our society.
From the beginning of the writing process, I knew the film would have been shot with a little crew and non-professional actors and I wanted to work with Vincent Lindon. More over I told Christophe Rossignon (the producer) and Vincent Lindon that I wanted to co-produce the project with a small budget and investing the most part of our payment to fund the film. Off course the crew has been properly paid.
Not every films can be made this way, but in this case was possible. The subjetc, the style and the self- financing the film are all coherence choices. It’s been for me the demonstration the films can be realized in a different way, nowadays when the film industry is concerning about how to fund the films. I also had to rethink the set design and staging, as well as my motivations. This film is the fruit of necessity.
I had already directed non professional actors in small roles, and every time I had felt they were leading me closer and closer to reality. That’s what I take a mainly interest in my job. I’ve wanted to force more the situation, putting in a great experieced actor among a cast made of only non professional. I wanted to push Vincent Lindon to work in an unexplored territory.
First at all I chose a DOP, who had worked only on documentary films. I wanted someone who was used to be completely autonomous with framing, focusing. So I’ve worked with Éric Dumont, a young director of photography, who was barely 30 years old and had never worked on a fiction film. I described him precisely my idea on the scene and then let him to translate it into a composition. At a certain point he has become an actual actor inside the scene, depending on what he was framing, he gave to the scene a meaning or another one. I was interesting in Thierry/Vincent’s point of view. He’s in the middle of the story. I’m interested in whatever he sees and feels.
That’s why I’ve filmed him for a long time, even when he wasn’t the main character in a certain scene.
I’ve filmed him as a boxer getting punched without necessarily filming who was punching him. That’s why we needed to use the cinemascope, because I needed to show what was going on in front and around him.
I was watching a man, who had given his body, his time, his energy to a company for 25 years before being put aside, because his bosses decided to produce the same product in another country, where the work costs less.
He hasn’t been fired, because he didn’t his job properly, but because some people wanted to earn more money. Thierry is the direct consequence of a few invisible stockholders who need to increase the stocks’ prices. This is the other face of unemployment statistics, that we listen to every day on the news. They can take up only a few line on the newspapers, but behind this news there are human tragedies. Thierry is a normal man – normal in dispite of the defeat experienced by him in the last years- in a inhumane situation: he has been unemployed for 20 months since his factory fired him and now he’s force to accept any job proposed to him. And what can he do, when this job put him into an ethically unaccettable situation?
Should he become accomplice of an unscrupulous system or leave it and come back to an unstable life? That’s the heart of the film. The place of a man inside the system.
Director’s bio-filmography
Stéphane Brizé was born in Rennes, North-West of France, in 1966. He studied as an electronic technician. After directing some pièces, he directed his first shorts in the early 90s and his first feature film in 1999 Le Blue des villes. In 2005 directed Je ne suis pas là pour etre aimè and in 2007 Entre Adultes.
La loi du marché is his sixth film, the third with Vincent Lindon (Mademoiselle Chambon, 2009 e Quelches heures de printetemps, 2012).