Critics reviews

For Alain Guiraudie, the director of this 2001 featurette, the world of physical labor is a man's world; the bluff nudity of the locker room vibrates with erotic tension, and the strenuous exertions in enforced close proximity emit hormonal shock waves. With poised and incisive images, the director finds the energizing fault lines in the loam of local culture and melds hulking industrial strength with the luminous enticements of the landscape.

The film's brooding homoeroticism subverts its apparent status as a realistic drama of labor relations. The mise en scène is haunting: vast, empty industrial hangars and theatrically staged scenes like the break-time tableau in which the workers sit relaxing under sunshades... The film is political in its theme of making room for love in the field of work, but it manifestly inhabits a different universe from the French workspace dramas of realists like Laurent Cantet.

The gay-themed twist is striking for how it naturally bubbles up to the surface, and resolves in an unforced and gently open direction. Jacques takes his relationships on with little baggage, ever the young man on the go from job to job, and the freedom he represents for men with no prospects becomes one of the film's several powerful and resonant themes.

About work, economics, class, sex, money, happiness and a whole lot more, this unassuming, sometimes funny and always surprising film has been hailed by Godard - perhaps the most sensible thing he's done in years. It's near perfect, without an ounce of narrative fat or stylistic gristle, and utterly relevant.

As subtly erotic as it is uncompromising and eccentric, Guiraudie's gem seemingly yet inconspicuously shatters its own myths. The generational gap that exists between two gay men becomes a kind of harmonic endgame while the fix-it man's relationship to his boss evokes all sorts of issues related to misplaced pride and opportunism in the face of weakness.