At War

At War

“Because you did not care, TIME was the most expensive thing that these men and women had to pay. It is also the only thing they do not have enough of.” Jon Stewart

There have been few speeches in recent memory that have channeled the righteous anger of a quintessential Capra protagonist more effectively or movingly–than the one Jon Stewart gave last month before a House committee made up mostly of conspicuously empty chairs, excoriating Congress’ inaction on behalf of 9/11 first responders, real-life heroes abandoned by the country they sacrificed everything to save. His blisteringly impassioned indictment had no irony or self-aggrandizement in it; it echoed democratic ideals embodied by James Stewart as both Jefferson Smith and George Bailey.

As governments worldwide continue to be hijacked by special interests, profits will invariably be valued above the welfare of workers, who will be ruined with countless others for competition’s sake. No wonder our international cinema lately has been teeming with 21st-century Capraesque figures such as Ken Loach’s Daniel Blake and Stéphane Brizé’s Thierry Taugourdeau; Vincent Lindon played the latter character in Brizé’s 2015 stunner The Measure of a Man as an unemployed factory worker who secures vital employment at a supermarket, where he is charged with informing on shoplifters.

In his gentle but devastating films about embattled people at their most quietly articulate and angry (a better screen actor than Lindon may never have existed), Brize has brought all this out into strong simmer in At War.

With his mustache shaved off and his eyes frequently bulging with outrage, Lindon gives an altogether fiercer performance here as Laurent Amédéo, spokesman for 1,100 employees at Agen, a car-part supply plant in France that Perrin Industries is closing down; this comes after the company had two years earlier promised that their jobs would be safe for at least five, so long as they worked longer hours without extra pay and gave up their bonuses.

It doesn’t take Laurent and his union representatives long in one of the movie’s many furious encounters (each staged within a sterile boardroom whose every surface seems coated in a scum of civility) to demonstrate that they know exactly what they’re doing. They add up the hours of unpaid labor that saved Perrin millions of euros; and they also show how much Agen’s profits have risen over the past year.

But with courts having ruled in favor of the company’s right to close down the plant despite no evidence being provided that such a move was economically necessary, Laurent leads his union out on strike for 23 days, refusing to return unless Hauser (Martin Hauser), CEO of Perrin’s German parent Dimke Group, which oversaw recent growths in shareholder dividends, agrees to meet with them.

If you’ve ever seen “Roger & Me,” Michael Moore’s still unsurpassed 1989 muckraking masterpiece about the systematic dismantling of Flint, Michigan after General Motors closed its plants there and who hasn’t? then you may find it impossible to watch At War without frequently thinking of Moore.

Moore may have expected that his study of the collapse of the middle class would not be well received if it were made into a feature-length film; that is why he decided to use satirical humor as a way of criticizing corporations, making fun of them through every well-timed joke or edit.

On the other hand, Brizé’s movie earns its title by bringing us face-to-face with workers who have been treated unfairly by their bosses; he does this by conveying their desperation in a way that is neither amusing nor entertaining. At the beginning of the film, cinematographer Eric Dumont shoots a street march with handheld camera moves so shaky and disorienting one might think these activists were charging up Normandy beach.

Brizé and Dumont, as they did in “The Measure of a Man,” find ways to hold our attention for long periods at a time by allowing different parts of the action to unfold within single shots while moving back and forth between characters who are talking over each other; sometimes what is happening will be obscured by somebody’s head, nowhere more poetically than when Laurent finds himself squeezed between two blurred figures on either side of the frame, signifying his newfound disconnect from his peers.

Lindon is no doubt the film’s strongest performer, but he shares the screen with an equally magnificent cast of nonprofessional actors, many of whom have their characters’ names. In this case, Hauser may be Roger Smith to the nth degree, but the CEO who emerges as the most despicable of all (and that really means something) is Perrin’s CEO Censier (Guillaume Draux), who can’t wipe that smug look off his face when he tells the newly jobless they are free to move. Serving as a kind of referee during these fraught encounters is the French president’s special adviser, Grosset (Jean Grosset), a babbling pest whose supposed union-mindedness amounts to nothing more than empty talk.

I particularly liked the calm reasonableness of the union lawyer (Valérie Lamond), so adept at arguing that it is morally incumbent upon Agen and indeed any government to take care of its workers while pointing out that employees cannot be “the shareholder’s adjustment variable.” She also has a reasonable tone whenever Laurent gets fired up.

Laurent’s tragic flaw his volatile temper threatens repeatedly to be his undoing even as he tells his mates they must keep cool, shushing their rowdy chants and exhorting them to fight smart. As tensions mount between Laurent’s steadfast colleagues, like pregnant Mélanie (Mélanie Rover), and those willing to settle for a big payoff and go home, a few of their fellow rebellers resort to exactly this type of misogynistic name calling about our own president.

Laurent’s obstinate activists do have a point when they complain about how little interest he seems to take in how the media are portraying their movement. It’s typical for movies to letterbox news coverage; Brizé takes a looser approach here, showing how each segment compresses the aspect ratio in tandem with its limited context.

The most shocking event is seen on an iPhone, and its jarringly melodramatic punctuation of the narrative is one of the movie’s few missteps. More effective is the carnage wrought by enraged workers that a reporter narrates with play by play commentary, never mentioning the criminal acts that fueled this violence. In one of the film’s scariest sequences, officers brandish riot shields to push Laurent and his band of activists out of a lobby they’re basically herding them like cattle. It’s a fitting metaphor for how we provoke violence in the vulnerable by shoving them out of sight until they snap.

One of Brizé and co-writer Olivier Gorce’s coldest truths is how those driven purely by money will always be more united than their opponents because they are not divided by empathy. The filmmaker’s portrayal of infighting among union members could just as easily apply to America’s current Democratic party, which has been fractured by compromise and deceit. While many of Lindon’s outbursts in the movie are cathartically powerful, it is disturbing to see him fail to rein in his fury during his long-awaited meeting with Hauser there is no control there at all.

Did any one of us do better, on hearing that the company was not legally obliged to sell its factory (even though there is a potential buyer ‘circling’ who might be the union’s salvation)? Hauser, like Censier knows exactly what he is doing when he puts sarcasm into his words: he wants an exploitative clip for the news cameras.

‘At War’ is a draining film to watch in the best possible way; it exhausts our anger at all those forces which dehumanise society until we are left feeling empty but with a new clarity about what lies ahead. My father’s generation had pensions now gone and most Americans are condemned by this loss to hustle against ‘TIME,’ as The Chambers Brothers so indelibly marked it in their metronomic anthem ‘Time Has Come Today.’

That could be the theme song for this movie too, with its vision of souls dislodged and battered beneath the rolling wave. To stop his film becoming two hours of shouts, Brizé cuts off dialogue many times over and replaces it with minimal music by Bertrand Blessing: never more effectively than when old militants get lifted from blocking the factory gate before being bounced around by cops in armor. In these rhythms of industry there ought to beat something justiciable if life were fairer; they suggest only how things grind on without noticing whose bones they happen across next.

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