User Reviews

The docu-drama is the genre that brings you up close and personal to real life. Its hyper-realism can make you feel like a witness to a real-time situation, often with jittery hand-held cameras, minimalist acting and cluttered sets that recreate the existential ordinariness of everyday living. We find all of this in The Measure of a Man (2016), an outstanding docu-drama that is excruciatingly realistic. It is also a grindingly slow story that compels us to witness the everyday indignities endured by ordinary people who struggle through harsh economic times.

Set in France, the story is told through the eyes of middle-aged and life-weary Thierry (Vincent Lindon) who lost his machinist job a year ago when his factory closed. The plot line is based on a series of vignettes where Thierry endures the indignities of a principled man who must work in an unprincipled world. Plot and technique converge as we are drawn into Thierry's world to feel his suppressed anger and to see how far he can be pushed. The employment agency forces him to undergo training that proves useless; he must participate in self-improvement seminars and endure the sneering insults of less experienced people; and the condescending remarks by bank staff and job interviewers belittle him without offering hope. With a wife and special-needs son to support he must consider selling cherished assets, but then lands a job as a megastore security guard and things look brighter. The store wants to increase profits and lay off older workers so he must police petty pilfering by shoppers and staff. One by one, he sees human misery being multiplied by actions he is forced to take. Without saying a word, we feel his disgust and his moral entrapment.

This is an unusual film and one that many audiences will find difficult to watch. While all films try to reach us emotionally, this one deliberately makes the viewer feel uncomfortable and even agitated to the point where some may want to leave. The shaky camera often adopts a fixed viewpoint and stays there for what feels like a squirm-in-your-seat eternity. We are there alongside Thierry while he interrogates a youth, a pensioner and several staff, and are silent witnesses to their palpable fear. The film title speaks of the measure of a man, but this compelling film dramatically demonstrates that the measure of modern society is how it treats the dispossessed and disadvantaged.

When the Ken Loach's style encounters Dardenne's brothers' one. One more true, accurate, social movie, as real as you have the feeling to watch actual characters for actual events, the kind you may meet everyday around you. The fierce, ruthless, cruel face of the real world. The actors here are not actually ones, but authentic characters. The way of playing reminds me LE PASSE, I saw two years ago. It doesn't look like a film, I repeat. Vincent Lindon is perfect here, as terrific as usual for such a character. An unemployed guy who, just after losing his job, has to fight every day to survive, to struggle like a dog to help his wife and retarded son to make it in this jungle that life is. So, he eventually finds a job as a security guard in a large department store. For him, that will be a more deeply dive into the fierce ugliness of life.

An outstanding feature that doesn't make you laugh.

"La Loi Du Marché" is a cruel, bleak, and stark picture of the struggles of a middle-class man in France who gets laid off from his job. The movie follows his daily efforts and tribulations to find a new job and adjust to a lower salary and a different setting while fending off financial difficulties and taking care of his wife and his disabled son. The second part of the movie is focused on his job as a security guard in a grocery store and the humiliation of customers and co-workers who tend to steal out of poverty and need. The protagonist finds himself in a hot spot, pitched against people from his class, suffering the same daily degradation and lack of means. Finally, he walks out, perhaps for a break or to quit. It's not entirely clear. The movie wasn't sentimental or poetic in any sense. It was direct and shot in a documentary-like style, making it more believable. The final scene was vague and open and left much to be desired in terms of a conclusion.

Measure of a Man is the English title of Stéphane Brizé's La Loi du marché starring Vincent Lindon as Thierry Taugourdeau, a middle-aged factory worker who finds himself out of a job and having great difficulty in finding a new one.

Brize used non-professional actors in the roles opposite Lindon, shooting it in a cinéma vérité style.

The first half of the film is fairly interesting, chronicling the difficulties suddenly downsized workers encounter after working in the same job for many years.

Thierry is seen complaining to the employment agency worker about how he wasted his time and money taking a crane operator course only to discover he still would not be hired due to a lack of actual experience on the job.

An attorney tries to convince Thierry to become part of a class-action lawsuit against his former employer but Thierry wants none of that explaining simply that he wants to "move on."

In his quest for documentary-like realism, director Brizé tends to drag out scenes (which basically amount to a series of vignettes) detailing aspects of Thierry's life as he navigates the unchartered territory of the unemployed.

Some scenes are effective such as when a potential employer lamely criticizes his resume and basically tells him he has virtually no chance of being hired. Thierry also has an interesting but long-winded discussion with his banker, rejecting her suggestion to sell his house to cover various expenses he must deal with as a result of now being unemployed.

Less successful are tangential drawn out scenes including the dance lessons he takes with his wife as well as the failed negotiations with a potential buyer of the couples' mobile home which they put up for sale-again to make ends meet.

Adding to the verisimilitude is the couple's teenage son Matthieu who has cerebral palsy. But Brizé unfortunately does not develop the wife's part at all, and she ends up having little to do throughout.

The second half of the film focuses on Thierry after he obtains a job in the security department of a large department store. In the first half Thierry is pro-active and is a sympathetic character striving to support his family.

But once employed, he's now a passive character and takes on more of an observational role in his job dealing with shoplifters and wayward employees who attempt to game the system.

Brizé wants us to have sympathy for all those caught in the security department's net basically arguing that they are victims of an unfeeling capitalist system.

Even the first shoplifter we meet has a potent excuse: a criminal outside the store forced him to steal a cell phone charger through intimidation. There are others including an elderly man who steals some meat but has no extra money to pay for it or relatives to help him.

Worse yet is a long-trusted employee accused of pocketing coupons. She's unceremoniously fired and then commits suicide while on the job (all this happens off screen and is communicated to us through a meeting a store official holds with Thierry and his fellow employees).

Brizé cleverly uses surveillance camera footage to show how the various techniques shoplifters employ as they try and steal items from the store.

Brizé stacks the deck as none of the shoplifters are shown to be unsavory in the least. Thierry is now reduced to being part of the "system," a passive observer of various indignities that happen to other people even worse off than he is.

Brizé shows a lack of imagination in his plotting as he never resolves Thierry's story. On the DVD extras, Brizé suggests Thierry is a hero. I'm not sure why. At film's end, does Thierry decide to quit the job? It's unclear.

Whatever the case is, Brizé's film ends abruptly with his protagonist's fate unresolved.

Whatever sympathy we have for Thierry is mitigated by the director's bleeding-heart liberalism-an unbalanced view of victims and victimizers which compromises the film's overall verisimilitude.

The movie started really well, the atmosphere was oppressing, the individuals and the situations, gray. You could feel the lack of life, the lack of happiness, everything routine, all over the place, no compassion, not even when dancing. Sometimes a faint smile. Is that the average life of the working class in France ? And the miserable steeling of miserable items, sold excessively expensive.

Passing the middle of the film, you wonder where the director aims to direct. The answer stays open till the end. To nowhere, except maybe suicide.

What a pointless movie, where people are drawn as vegetables, unable to have a life of their own, beside the colorless feeling of the daily job.

Luckily, life is quite different, and despite all the precarious situations of many french people, they never loose their sense of humor, which by the way is completely lacking in this movie as a possible answer to the dullness of existence.

This is a movie wherein much is put in by film judges and critics that is simply not there. Those who find "stuff" name off basically the usual pretentious leftist pablum. No better example than Prize of the Ecumenical Jury - Special Mention drivel "For its prophetical stance on the world of work and its sharp reflection on our tacit complicity in the inhumane logics of merchandising." Say what??? No, I'm not interested in prices going up just to fund some clerk's druggy son or because somebody needs a DVD fix. And I'll exercise my own freedom when it comes to loyalty points. To nominate this film for the Krzysztof Kieslowski Award is a travesty on that great director's work. This is a movie only a Bernie Sanders could like.

Another dead bone... This is pure dirt... so low, that people run for it at Cannes, because it's so morally respectable. I had the chance to look at the very start, first scene of it in the middle of last Miller's workhorse Mad Max Fury Road and another big and great film, Lawrence of Arabia... Well, I had a hard time. Oh boy it's so low... so slow and so disastrous ! Like sniffing a dead chip out of r-o-t-t-en waters, dried on a dog's s-h-i-t for one night long. Just so unbelievable...

I don't care saying it's a very bad work, when people are just ashamed, because it's about morons and poor sick people. OK u only find morons in this film... But even morons have a kind of beauty, right ? This is the dead head of social doctrines, it's not about people. Go for this social dry toast. It's one of a kind. Let me see... Imagine yourself in front of two heroes arguing about learning some insane manual job that isn't even gonna pay ! But maybe one should learn if he wanna stay in a active state of mind ! But... but...

So one and one... If very low is now the law... nobody will feel lonely facing the dead head of these so politically correct doctrines.