HUMAN RESOURCES
Reviewed by Harvey Karten Shooting Gallery Series Director: Laurent Cantet Writer: Laurent Cantet, Gilles Marchand Cast: Jalil Lespert, Jean-Claude Vallod, Chantal Barre, Veronique de Pandelaere, Michel Begnez, Lucien Longueville, Danielle Melador, Pascal Semard
My civics teacher taught me that America is a classless society and I believed him until I graduated from high school and took a temp job in a large coffee processing plant in Brooklyn's Greenpoint section. My seventeenth summer was not a romantic one. My job was to type reports, send bills, do general office work. Everyone had lunch in the company cafeteria and there I got my awakening. All the blue-collar workers sat on one side on the large mess hall, the white collar people on the other. I was naive and asked my new summer pal why this was so in 100% of the cases. He said vaguely that this was not a matter of snobbery. It's just that those who got coffee on their hands had little in common with those who--absent the wonderful aroma of the cheap blended coffee--could have been working in a dress factory. Maybe. I think now that snobbery was involved. In the 1950s you were a snappy piece of work if you wore a white shirt to the job and came home with barely a ring around the collar. Imagine how I felt later on in my career when I discovered that the gulf between the executives and the white collar workers was even greater!
Europeans are not so innocent. The Continent has always been divided by class and in Laurent Cantet's striking film, which was shown at New York's Museum of Modern Art New Directors/ New Films series as well as at film fests in Thessaloniki, Torino, Sundance, and San Sebastian, a twenty-one year old business school graduate gets an on-the- job education that his graduate studies will scarcely duplicate. "Human Resources" sometimes looks like a docu-drama composed by a militant union, but at its heart it's the story of a permanent rift between a father and son caused ironically by dad's own dedication to his son's education and need to give the boy a life he did not have the opportunity to live. This is the theme that gives the work its altogether human measure.
Opening on a family scene in a provincial French town, "Human Resources" hones in on young Frank (Jalil Lespert), ready to take his first serious job in life--as a management intern in a large factory that welds machine parts. Sporting a finely tailored suit on his first day, he is escorted by his dad (Jean-Claude Vallod), who has worked in that same plant for thirty years, to the human resources head (Pascal Semard) and then to the chief of the factory (Lucien Longueville), who takes paternal interest in the lad and soon fills him with promises of stellar references. Notwithstanding, Frank does not get a swell head, in fact, because his father works in the plant and he comes from a working-class background, he holds a sympathy for the ordinary factory hands and is amused and almost enthralled by the tough talk of the Communist union boos, Mrs. Arnoux (Danielle Melador). After innocently distributing a referendum to tabulate workers' opinions on a proposed thirty-hour week, he is stunned by a letter he finds in the private computer of the personnel manager, a letter that ultimately leads the plant to strike.
As dramatic and often amusing as the details of employment are, the real hub of the picture is Frank's conflict with his father. On the one hand the boy is appreciative of the chance he is given to pursue a degree in business administration. On the other hand he harbors a long-standing resentment of his father's social class, actually disgusted that the man has meekly gone to work, standing up, bent over a machine that punches up some metal slabs. In fact, when the old man expresses pride in his efficiency with his machine--which treats as though it were his baby--Frank is all the more repulsed. The entire film builds up to a staggering climactic scene in which the young man fiercely lets out all his repressed rage at the father. The look on Jean-Claude Vallod's face throughout the diatribe is the single key highlight of the entire story.
What is particularly astonishing is that Jalil Lespert in the role of young Frank is the only professional actor in the piece. To director Laurence Cantet's credit, the rest of the cast perform credibly and with heartfelt emotion as though they were indeed going through the torments themselves. In fact, Danielle Melador as the fiery Mrs. Arnoux really is a union leader and Lucien Longeuville is in fact an executive.
The picture made me look book once again in disgust at a scene I witness from time to time. Whenever the local Macy's department store (formerly A&S) had conducted a strike on Fulton Street in my Brooklyn neighborhood, I would witness scores of similar working-class people march right past the pickets, through the revolving doors, as though the folks holding the signs and fighting for their economic lives were not their brothers and sisters. Since I have personally been on--and in fact led my fellow public high school teachers--in five risk-filled strikes during my teaching career, I have a feeling of camaraderie with my fellows in the working class--and call us teachers middle-management or what you want, we are indeed working class. I remain repulsed by the unkind choices made by ordinary people to patronize stores that are the scenes of labor disputes.
In "Human Resources," Frank is in dire straits. Sympathizing with labor while knowing he will never work like them with his hands and on the other hand educated to be part of management, he will spend his days in conflict, unable to climb down his metaphoric fence to take a stand on one side or the other. How poignant the old union song, "Which side are you on/ Which side are you on."
Not Rated. Running time: 100 minutes. (C) 2000 by Harvey Karten, film_critic@compuserve.com
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