The film series Adèle Exarchopoulos: Fire Starter begins showing exclusively on MUBI in many countries on August 10, 2023.
Zero Fucks Given (Emmanuel Marre and Julie Lecoustre, 2021).
Cassandre (Adèle Exarchopoulos) is not having it. She’s listening to someone invisible, someone with authority, addressing her and a few other flight attendants in unplaceably accented English. This is their manager, instructing them how to sell the duty-free in the air, how to push the pricey alcohol—a little snippet of the very alienated, very feminized service labor that makes contemporary convenience industries (in this case, cheap international flights) run. We know it’s a cheap airline because they wear bright, synthetic-looking uniforms; one of them looks intently at the off-camera speaker, nodding in a serious, brown-nosing kind of way. But Cassandre, wearing lots of makeup—very red lips, winged black eyeliner—is blank, petulant, distracted, looking back and forth from her coworker and manager, definitely thinking something like, “I don’t give a shit” (an alternate translation of the film’s French title, Rien à foutre, rendered in English as Zero Fucks Given [2021]).
When Cassandre finally speaks—prompted by a question from her eager colleague, who wonders if they keep their own sales or split them evenly—it’s in the thick French accent of someone not very educated, stumbling over English phrasing in one-to-one translations that don’t really work: “They consider maybe it’s not fair?” (Later, lamenting that she’d never be hired by the luxury airline Emirates, she alludes to her embarrassing monolingualism, her “little bit of English.”) But later, preparing to sell on the flight, she smooths her ponytail and presses her lipstick, and then she’s on: smiling, seducing, talking animatedly to the fliers as she runs their credit cards.
Adèle Exarchopoulos has an improbable smile. It’s almost cartoonish, filling the bottom of her face and creating inverted commas with her cheeks at the corners, like a child’s drawing. Her features are large in general, and so with heavy makeup, she looks drawn on and colored in, undeniably gorgeous but also—a bit much. Which is to say, a little garish, somewhat tacky; which is to imply, low class. That is the most striking, the most unusual thing about Exarchopoulos as an international star: she is a French actress who reads as working class. There is nothing understated or discreet about her affect, nothing “chic,” adjectives that code (old) money, education, class. Instead, she’s floppy, loud, and tonally unsubtle on screen (even when she’s doing subtle things as an actor). As Cassandre in Rien à foutre, directed by Emmanuel Marre and Julie Lecoustre, she downs vodka at the end of her shift, dances at the club in a powder blue sweatshirt, and there’s nothing controlled or elegant about her; she fits right in at this shitty club, trolling for molly.
This is clearly a quality that’s been noticed by directors, who cast her over and over in roles whose working- or lower-middle-class status is either narratively central (as her character’s conservative family figures prominently in her breakout film, Abdellatif Kechiche's Blue Is the Warmest Color, from 2013) or importantly alluded to. In The Five Devils (2022), directed by Léa Mysius, we spend a good deal of time with the clutter of her cheap furnishings in the working-class housing development of her character’s dismal provincial town. In Sibyl (2019), directed by Justine Triet, she plays a young actress, Margot, whose blatant striving and violent emotions contrast sharply to Virginie Efira’s tasteful therapist Sibyl, whom Margot obsessively attaches to; in a crucial scene, Margot blurts out that her lurid problems signify that she can’t escape her lower-class background. In Orphan (2016; directed by Arnaud des Pallières), she plays the title character while she’s in her twenties, as a rent girl who seduces her older protector. Orphan—in which we watch her in less than thirty minutes in three different sex scenes with three different people in positions of power over her— brings to the surface a disturbing undercurrent of Exarchopoulos’s “type”: the suggestion that she reads as exploitable. Even when it isn’t depicted as blatantly as it is in Orphan, most of her roles could be summed up as “hot mess.” In a sense, this is true of Rien à foutre as well—its title refers to the “fuck it” attitude of Cassandre, whose mother, we learn, has recently died in a car accident—except that the film also comments directly on this exploitability and allows her to reflect on it in her performance.
Orphan (Arnaud des Pallières, 2016).
Rien à foutre is a film about exploitation as both choice and social compulsion, and it makes smart use of Exarchopoulos’s type. One gets the sense that she is playing with it herself, framing her character’s resigned social performances. The scenes in which Cassandre advertises her sexual availability are especially revealing. In the company apartments on Lanzarote, she wipes off her makeup, texting on a hookup app with bitter urgency; later, taking nude photos to text, she holds her breasts awkwardly and tumbles off her bed. When she does have sex, the lighting is bright and hideous. Usually, we just see the morning after, as she slumps on a beach chair outside the shared apartment for flight attendants. When she smiles at work, it feels more and more icky, and by the middle of the film, we know why: we see a series of flight attendants, her coworkers, go through a filmed training, performing an exercise that requires them to hold a smile for a full thirty seconds. Of course, it’s acting, explicitly so. It’s an audition.
With this scene, Rien à foutre articulates the intersection of service work and acting—a connection first drawn by Arlie Russell Hochschild’s classic 1983 sociology of Delta flight attendants, The Managed Heart, the book that popularized the concept of emotional labor. Hochschild noticed that the personae flight attendants are instructed to take on as part of their jobs—to always be cheerful, calm, and collected; to project confidence and competence and a vaguely sexual atmosphere on the planes—closely resembled theatrical acting, specifically the realist acting techniques of Constantin Stanislavsky, the Russian director who invented the techniques that became famous in the US as “the method.” Emotional labor not only asks that workers bring their emotional selves to work, but also makes emotional performance central to the performance of their jobs. This, for Hochschild, was an unaccounted-for burden on these women (and in her book, they are all women): a new form of exploitation through which corporations like Delta squeeze out profit from uncompensated work.
Hochschild thought the comparison would ultimately serve to distinguish professional acting from service work. Real actors, in her view, are practiced at turning emotion on and off, while the flight attendants’ performances have no boundaries; they are more and more exhausted, without really knowing why. But the contemporary generalization of service-work-as-acting—more and more people work service jobs, and more and more of these jobs explicitly require lots of acting—is matched by a wider generalization of acting itself: performing for a camera is something a lot of people do a lot of the time. It wouldn’t surprise anyone to say that our jobs, even “professional” jobs that are supposed to be about knowledge and expertise, come with intense affective and emotional demands—nor would anyone blanch at the idea that our social performances make the wheels of commerce spin. Does anyone today think they aren’t acting much of the time, and that someone else is reaping the profit?
But this generalized, everyday acting doesn’t mean that we’re all equally good at it—and the widespread practice of casting amateurs has the unintended effect of making this clear. The directors of Rien à foutre cast almost their whole film with nonprofessionals, except their star. Exarchopoulos matches their tossed-off patter and unselfconscious tasks, but her charisma rivets the frame, even when she’s doing very little. There is a difference. Her face is more elastic and more transparent, registering flickers of emotion, and her voice is fuller and more supple than theirs. While brushing off a pair of strikers who try to convince Cassandre and her coworkers to join them, at first she’s chiding and dismissive, but as soon as she’s challenged to explain what she means when she says she “doesn’t believe in change,” she breaks. Asked what she thinks about the future, her voice lifts in attempted frivolity, and her eyes just slightly glaze: “For the future? I don’t even know if I’ll be alive tomorrow, so I just want to get on my flight.” Later, while talking on the phone with another service worker, the customer service agent for her cell phone company, she keeps chewing her gum as the agent refers to her mother, but with less motion; her chin trembles just once. During the training, she first appears before the camera with a childish smile, but can’t hold it. “All those emotions you have,” the trainer’s voice offscreen tells her, “you need to leave them behind.” But of course she can’t, and that’s what we’re seeing in Exarchopoulos the actor; we see the character try to suppress an emotion, and we see that suppression fail. That classic dynamic of realist acting is often the quality that separates actors from non-actors: we can see the actors have two feelings at once.
Zero Fucks Given (Emmanuel Marre and Julie Lecoustre, 2021).
I’m emphasizing the psychological nature of her acting because it would be easy to focus, on the one hand, on Exarchopoulos’s physical intensity and, on the other, her spontaneity and authenticity onscreen. There’s something leering about this combination: the actress as beautiful animal, or sexy child. Focusing too much on her apparent authenticity risks downplaying the serious work she’s doing; focusing on her physicality gets even trickier, intermingling commentary on her body itself and on her grace and craft. The most interesting of Exarchopoulos’s films, like Rien à foutre, seem attuned to this. In others, awareness of her objectification commingles with its promotion. The Five Devils contrasts the nubile, exuberant teenage gymnast we see in flashbacks to the tense and dissatisfied young mother we know in the present. Her alcoholic father tells her she looks like a sack of potatoes in her sweaters and jeans, that she should try to look sexier for her husband; she balks, and we know how unhappy she is in her marriage. But the film itself takes an odd position on the issue, showing her over and over in swimsuits, leotards, short shorts. The opening shot grazes her ass, while the camera follows the rubbing of oil on her legs and back before she swims.
Where The Five Devils punts, Rien à foutre is tart. Over the course of long sequences in which we watch Cassandre going through her days, we see her turn her face on and off, interrupting the charisma that could simply be mesmerizing. Late in the film, we see her audition again, this time for a private jet company based in Dubai. Fired from her job at the low-cost airline, she’s gone back to her parents’ petit-bourgeois home in Belgium. She pulls a white shirt and blazer from her mother’s closet, and cakes on makeup for the video interview; we watch her skin change color, from its natural variation to a flat, smooth beige. The irony of her responses is sharp, but the filmmakers and Exarchopoulos play it low-key: squashed in the bottom half of the frame, she lowers her eyes to look at the computer, so that although we see the expressive performance she’s engaged in—the tension in her face and of her smile, the brisk erectness of her posture—it’s not directed at us.
With this distance from her charisma, the chirpy, people-pleasing femininity of her answers is painful to listen to: “I would define myself as an enthusiastic person, really positive, I love adventures, travel, and meeting new people.” Occasionally her eyes flicker away from the computer and around the room, as if steeling herself for the focus required of the act she’s putting on; and the questions get personal, underlining the sexualization, the total-service of the job: “What is your relationship status? Do you have any boyfriend, do you plan to have any kids?” For a second her face freezes. “Oh no, I’m—completely single, I mean I’m not attached to anything or anyone, I have no ties…” How would she deal with a “guest” flying into Kinshasa who wants sushi for dinner? “In the worst case, I would make it myself.” How would she deal with a guest making an inappropriate advance? She knows the answer to this one: “Oh, when this situation came, I always try to delay, to avoid the situation but not directly to say no. So I try to avoid physical contact with him, I would pretend to be called by the deck, for example, um, or I will make a little joke, ‘Watch, we are flying over the Alps right now.’” “Great,” the interviewer says, “Your hair, is it your natural color?” “Yes…but…I can be blond if it’s better…for the guests.”
Later, cutting from the dour drizzle of low-rise Belgium to the skyscrapers of Dubai, we see Cassandre silhouetted in the window of a hotel, gazing down at her phone. When she does venture out, she’s wearing a face mask, ushered along by security guards, instructed to stand in a socially-distanced square, isolated and alone in the artificial razzle-dazzle of the Dubai mall. Realistic, yes, but the mask is also highly effective, hiding her face until the film’s final shot. She pulls her mask down, revealing her face to us: we’ve taken on the perspective of her online audience, seeing her as if through the camera of her phone. Like everyone else, she’s taking—composing—a selfie.