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Human Resources

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The film Human Resources illustrates the dilemma of when class differences clash as a young man from a lower class tries to rise to a higher class. The young man, Franck (Jalil Lespert), returns to his hometown to begin an internship for human resources at a local factory. Franck's father, a machinist, who is close to retirement, works for the same company that he is doing his internship for. Franck's childhood friends also work for the same company, and now Franck has to assume the role as a leader over the people of his past. The status change that Franck has acquired through higher academic achievement does not come with as smooth of a transition, as he expected, as it becomes a rough journey into personal socioeconomic choices.

Franck's intentions are honorable as he attempts to balance the internship at a managerial position in the human resource department with his parents and friends' social standing. But as expected a life of profiteering collides with the socially learned values that Franck has acquired from a young age as he sees the injustices committed by the company for which he is interning. Franck faces a decision of what is right and wrong, but also a decision that could destroy a potential successful future.

Laurent Cantet's vision depicts the social inequality between the rich and poor in a modern society thought the business student Franck and his choices. Cantet also displays the daily hard work of the blue-collar population, as their daily endeavors are frequently directed by the white-collar sector. Through the careful direction of Cantet the audience gets to experience a political cinematic experience, which offers much food for thought. The cinematography enhances the experience through the documentary-like style of the film as it creates an authentic atmosphere. This authentic atmosphere makes the story so much more personal to the audience, which in the end leaves the audience pondering social difference.

This is a surprisingly strong film about labor and family relations in small French suburb. This earlier feature by one of France's rising stars of Cinema (see his exceptional TIME OUT) is heart breaking in it's depection of factory life and the mutability of family ties. With excellent real life performances the films near documentary style only adds to it's power.

I thought this was played in a rather too pedestrian manner until near the end when the unspoken conflict between the father and the son exploded. In a sense this is a story more or less a century behind its time. We have the factory and the bosses, and we have the workers whose labor is exploited by those who own and control the capital. We have the union organizers who are little different from those who long ago sought a worker's paradise while employing communist tactics.

But where this is different is that it depicts the conflict in a contemporary setting with the institution of the 35-hour week as the bone of contention. Jalil Lespert plays Franck, the son who is home for the summer from college in Paris to serve as a management trainee at the factory where his father (Jean-Claude Vallod) is employed. The father is a throwback to the loyal worker of the 19th century who was wedded to the machine, who adored the machine, someone who has completely accepted his status as worker/cog in the greater machine that is the factory. Even in his off hours he works cutting wood using a large buzz saw in his garage. But he wants something better for his son.

The son is personable and talented. He puts together a questionnaire that allows management to see how its employees feel about the 35-hour week in order to better manipulate them. By accident he discovers that management is going to fire 12 workers, most of whom have spent their entire working lives for the company. This is the crisis point for the son.

Without going into plot details, what we discover at the end is that the father despises himself because he is nothing more than a man who feeds a machine while the son reveals that he at some level hates his father because he is a factory worker, a man who had neither the ability nor the gumption to raise about his station in life and a man who is afraid to question management.

Bottom line: slow and realistic to the point of being mundane with professional, but uninspired direction by Laurent Cantet.

"Human Resources" is an excellent docudrama about labor issues in France following the instatement of the 35-hour work week (a measure taken to help remedy the country's unemployment crisis). The film has a wonderfully realistic tone and authentic characters coping with the challenges of everyday life in the modern world. Director Laurent Cantent (of the superb "Time Out") has given us as substantive a look at public issues working themselves out in individual lives as we saw in Soderbergh's "Erin Brockovich" or Sayles' "Matewan."