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Work Hard Play Hard

Screening: Monday 10 September, 6:30pm

Work Hard Play Hard [Violence des échanges en milieu tempéré] (Jean-Marc Moutout, France/Belgium 2003)

Office work and its horrors have increasingly become a central theme of recent French cinema, notably in films by Philippe Harel (the Houellebecq adaptation Whatever) and Laurent Cantet (Human Resources). Jean-Marc Moutout’s film offers further insight into the world of ambitious young execs on the make, on the loose and on the fast track to moral perdition.

Jérémie Rénier plays a young trainee newly signed up with a prestigious management consulting firm, and placed under the tutelage of a company hotshot (Laurent Lucas), who walks the walk, talks the talk and brooks no argument. Sent to the provinces to oversee the audit of a metal company, he soon realises his task is to prepare the way for redundancies all round, and feels the pull of a less compromised life with his single-mother girlfriend back in Paris. But things aren’t that easy.

If Moutout’s film echoes other workplace dramas — Cantet’s, as well as such Faustian business tales as Wall Street — the detail and the strong acting give it its distinctive touch, with the impersonal opening locale of La Défense, and the script’s matchless ear for baroque French management-speak, adding to the realistic thrust.

Written by Moutout, Ghislaine Jésou and Olivier Gorce. Photographed by Claude Garnier. With Jérérmie Renier, Laurent Lucas, Cylia Malki, Olivier Perrier.

(35mm, Colour, 99 mins, In French with English subtitles)

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