Avis des critiques

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.

The Measure of a Man" is two movies in one, and it's peculiar that Brizé seems not to have realized their distinction. The story of the unemployed Thierry is only superficially affecting because of its flat, depersonalized, and yet manipulative drama... Yet the story of the employed Thierry—of Thierry the security guard—is one of the most absorbing and suspenseful modules of any recent movie, and one of the most effective recent blendings of documentary and fiction.

Lindon pulls off something similar to what Imelda Staunton so memorably accomplished in Mike Leigh's Vera Drake: After spending the first half of the film in constant motion, Thierry almost completely shuts down for its second half, scarcely uttering a word after being hired. His growing distaste at serving as a representation of The Man has to be read on his face, which Lindon somehow manages to keep placid while still registering the necessary emotion.

French director Stéphane Brizé films in lingering takes, with Lindon in almost every shot, and the actor is wonderful, able to convey Thierry's conflict even when his back is to the camera. Rather than ceaselessly making him a victim, this simple, moving film turns on whether Thierry can bear to work for the same forces that are holding him down.

Mr. Brizé, who wrote the script with Olivier Gorce, doesn't break ground here. Yet, with Mr. Lindon's help and in several extraordinary scenes in the market's back office — a white hell in which people are pushed to sell out one another — Mr. Brizé transforms one individual's story into a social tragedy.

Like last year's Two Days, One Night, The Measure of a Man is a triumph of realistic cinema, and a dirge for a blue-collar European worker left stranded after a once-solid job has melted away. Co-writer/director Stéphane Brizé often thrusts us into situations without any prior exposition, then gives the scene plenty of room to unspool as we figure out what's going on and soak in the atmosphere and emotions.

As with the Dardenne brothers' similarly didactic Two Days, One Night (an NYFF selection last year), Brizé's film takes an honorable, though obvious, position on the debasements of late capitalism; Thierry is less a complex individual than a noble working-class construct.

Films are often maddeningly vague about the role that jobs and money—which are essentially our gods—play in our lives because many of us go to them precisely to escape such uncomfortable matters, which is why The Measure of a Man represents such a gratifying shock to the system.

Lindon holds back energy so effectively that we do not know the depths to which his conscience is tested. To give away more means a spoiler, but this is a must-see, similar to a Dardennes project but no replica.

Brizé complicates the film's political message by subtle hints of Thierry's personal flaws and their effects on his life, as when he refuses both to join a class-action lawsuit against his former company and negotiate the price of his mobile home when he tries to sell it for some desperately need cash. Like a Brechtian learning play, the film works as a cry of quiet despair from the age of late capitalism by showing its politics rather than telling them.