Early One Morning

Writer-director Jean-Marc Moutout made his mark at the LFF in 2003 with Work Hard, Play Hard, a trenchant anatomy of French executive culture – and a key entry in the cycle of films (like Laurent Cantet’s Time Out) examining the malaise of alienation in the French workplace. Moutout pursues his exploration in Early One Morning, set this time in the banking world. Jean-Pierre Darroussin, one of France’s most watchable actors – and a peerless interpreter of sympathetic everyman roles – plays Paul, a successful and accomplished bank executive whose life, as we see in the film’s quietly explosive start, has gone off the rails. Moutout’s drama, with its complex jigsaw construction and intense evocation of office paranoia, shows Paul’s seemingly perfect life falling apart as he discovers how the machinery of the financial world is designed to chew up disposable human resources. With a memorably abrasive cameo by Xavier Beauvois as Paul’s more than unsympathetic new boss, Early One Morning wraps psychological insight, sociological analysis and downright rage in one compelling and superbly executed package. –BFI