The Measure of a Man

Brizé has cleverly cast people with an extraordinary confidence in front of the camera, which means that Lindon’s customary minimalist yet charismatic performance style blends wonderfully with the rest of the cast… More problematic is the fact that Karine is virtually silent throughout the film. She barely has a name and we have no sense of her life – we don’t know, for instance, whether she has a job or not: the film treat employment as a male issue.

Brizé transposes to narrative cinema multiple formal and thematic concerns of two great nonfiction filmmakers, Farocki and Wiseman. From Wiseman, Brizé borrows a visual style rooted in long takes and weirdly compelling shots of functionaries sitting at their desks. He also adopts Wiseman’s social perspective, presenting scenes from the life of an underemployed, formerly middle-class father in such a way that they register as symbolic of the experience of an entire profession or social class.

The tight-lipped protagonist wears an expression that’s gloomier than he actually is, and the watchful Lindon, who won best actor at Cannes last May for this third collaboration with Brizé, positively sinks into the role—thanks largely to the actor’s close-to-life work, the film often feels almost more aligned with the observational rigor of a Wiseman doc than the close-in naturalism of a Dardenne Bros. fiction.