Downsized

Human Resources offers a powerfully subjective evocation of what it feels like to fall prey to the sea changes that, with shocking rapidity, are altering the face of corporate-run workplaces the world over. Cantet makes us feel the daily stress of a hostile working environment: the chronic insecurity of wondering who, and how many, will have the boom lowered on them; the inner struggle between self-preservation and worker solidarity; the poisonous erosion of trust within and between levels of the organization; the toll taken on productivity, as well as on family and other long-standing friendships. As the movie ends, Franck gloomily asks a young black striker who’s married with twins what options he has if he’s not hired back after the strike. The question is never answered, but by then Cantet has placed us in the shoes not just of powerless workers in de-fanged unions, but of the hapless Franck, caught inescapably between serving his masters and screwing his subordinates. In today’s corporate structure, it’s hard to imagine a more thanklessly self-contradictory job than human-resources manager, which involves letting the workers eat cake on birthdays and holidays while serving as the axe that falls when top brass decides it’s time to shave the budget.

Time Out (2001), the second film in Cantet’s trilogy — the third is still in production — takes on the cripplingly inhuman nature of corporate work at the upper levels. In this masterpiece, which is based on a true story, Vincent, an executive recently fired from a job he hated, drifts around the country, sleeping in his car, pretending to his increasingly uneasy family that he’s still employed while enlisting friends in a grandiose and fraudulent global-investment scheme. He’s a monster in a monstrous world, and the movie is told from his point of view as he grows more and more detached from the reality of his situation. At the end, we see Vincent, his cover blown, calmly interviewing for a senior job in a firm indistinguishable from the one for which he had previously worked. He walks the walk and talks the talk, but his face is a spiritless mask of quiet despair.

In real life, this man went home and killed his entire family.