Actor-director Xavier Beauvois established a name for himself as the moody outsider of jeune cinema français with the autobiographical Nord and the existential AIDS drama Don’t Forget You’re Going to Die. After prominent roles in films by Philippe Garrel and Jacques Doillon, Beauvois returns to directing with this impressive third feature, a family drama in a Northern French industrial setting. Mathieu (Benoît Magimel) is a young factory worker, just like his brother and father. But he’s the rebel of the family, and when his father is suddenly sacked from the shop-floor job he has held for years, Mathieu decides to take revenge on the factory boss by starting an affair with his bored wife (Nathalie Baye). Inevitably, further conflict erupts, both within the family and in their community. Beauvois mixes hard realismoin a similar setting to the recent shop-floor success Ressources humainesowith resonant Oedipal drama and an often poetic perspective on local landscape. The result is a tense, ambitious, highly controlled work that sees Beauvois confidently stretching out in an ostensibly more mainstream but no less challenging direction.
France, 2000. English subtitles. Colour. Dolby digital stereo. 100 min.