The worth of man

Movie
German title	The worth of man
Original title	La loi du marché
Country of production	France
original language	French
Publishing year	2015
length	93 minutes
Age rating	FSK 0
Rod
Director	Stéphane Brizé
script	Stéphane Brizé, ; Olivier Gorce
camera	Eric Dumont
cut	Anne Klotz
occupation
	Vincent Lindon : Thierry Taugourdeau; Karine de Mirbeck : Thierry's wife; Matthieu Schaller : Thierry's son;

The Value of Man (original title La loi du marché ) is a film by the French director Stéphane Brizé , which premiered on May 18, 2015 as part of the Cannes Film Festival and was released a day later in French cinemas. The film was shown in German cinemas from March 17, 2016.

action

The trained machinist Thierry Taugourdeau loses his job as a skilled worker and becomes unemployed at over 50 years of age . Thierry is too old to still believe in a great career, but Thierry is also too far from retirement to do nothing and money is getting tight. Thierry has to go to the employment office , attend a retraining course and after a training course in which his appearance is trained , he has to endure several job interviews, some of which are conducted via Skype . Thierry realizes that unemployment means receiving instruction, supplicating, and relying on others. In addition, he constantly finds himself in asymmetrical communication situations, in which he has to present himself and be friendly, while his counterparts are allowed to stutter and talk in disorder. Thierry explains to an employee of the employment office how nonsensical he feels about the retraining measure.

Thierry experiences the same when he tries to get a loan from a bank. He is advised to sell his condominium, but he doesn't want to. The counselor refuses his application and instead suggests life insurance so that at least his loved ones are covered. Thierry has to take one blow after another, but still tries to keep his dignity. To relax, Thierry takes a dance class with his wife, but there too he is patronized by the dance teacher. At some point Thierry finds a job as a security guard in a large supermarket. There he works as a detective and would like to just do his job. When he videotaped a customer of shoplifting , Thierry himself has become a person in a position of power and also part of the surveillance apparatus that he had previously criticized. In his new job there is surveillance and distrust, because anyone could be a thief. For example, he has to investigate a long-time saleswoman who took the stamps and pursue an old man who stole meat because he could no longer afford it. A situation Thierry is familiar with. After the sobering experience of looking for work in his job, Thierry again finds himself in a moral dilemma and asks himself the question of whether he is able to obey the laws of this world of work and doubts whether he can really implement the mechanisms of the market economy, which to him seem inhuman want.

production

Stéphane Brizé (2013)

Staff and cast

The direction was taken over by Stéphane Brizé , who also wrote the script together with Olivier Gorce .

Thierry, the main character, is played by Vincent Lindon . Karine de Mirbeck took over the role of his wife and that of his son Matthieu Schaller . Other characters, who mostly have no names in the film, are played almost exclusively by lay people, who are what they represent in the film, also in real life. So the labor office worker to be seen actually worked in the labor exchange, the supermarket manager was a supermarket manager and the cashier was a cashier in real life too.

Filming

The shooting had taken place in Auberville and in Boussy-Saint-Antoine . A restless hand-held camera and improvised dialogues should give the impression of a documentation. Many scenes in the film were shot in medium long shots, some scenes were filmed in close-ups. Except for a few scenes, the film takes place in closed rooms.

publication

The film premiered on May 18, 2015 as part of the Cannes Film Festival and hit French cinemas a day later. The film was shown in German cinemas from March 17, 2016.

reception

Reviews

The film was able to convince 92 percent of the Rotten Tomatoes critics (of 52 critics in total, as of October 9, 2016). The consensus there says: With The Measure of a Man, director / co-writer Stéphane Brizé uses one man's heartrending story as a beautifully acted microcosm for life in the 21st-century global economy.

Andreas Kilb from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung says: There is a cinema of illusions and there is a cinema of reality, and both dream games and everyday images are part of the wealth of the medium. But if you ask yourself what is your own dignity and its historical meaning, then it is not the technical fireworks, but the reflections of the real world. So not 'Star Wars'. But 'The Value of Man'. For us.

Matthias Dell from SPIEGEL thinks that Brizé's pseudo-documentary film shows how much humiliation a job search can bring with it, and Lindon in his exact game as Thierry Taugourdeau wears the submissiveness he constantly demands, such as the badly fitting suit of the security guard, to which he later in Film will.

Alexandra Seitz from epd Film also emphasizes the nuanced play of the main actor: Lindon places the passive perception of Thierry at the center of his characterization, he relies on the expressiveness of his eyes and uses minimal resources to create the complex portrait of a once energetic man who is in a tight spot is driven, sees himself increasingly robbed of his strength and finally struggles on the edge of desperation for dignity and self-determination.