Another world: the Brizé-Lindon duo at their best (review)

The director of The Law of the Market and At War continues his exploration of the world of work, through the figure of a senior executive. Another great success.

Released in February 2022 in cinemas, Another world will arrive this Tuesday evening unencrypted on France 2. First advises you.

The subject has fascinated Stéphane Brizé for years. The inevitable drift of the world of work with employees relegated to the rank of costs to be reduced to satisfy the insatiable greed of shareholders. This reality turns out to be so basely Manichean that any screenwriter who would have imagined it would certainly have seen his work reworked.

We measure by this yardstick all the power of the fictional cinema of Brizé who seizes it for the third time after The law of the market And In warof which Another world constitutes the counter-field. After the figure of a trade unionist ready to do anything to save his comrades from planned layoffs, it is time for the torments of an executive of a large company. Caught between a rock and a hard place. Forced to enforce decisions that he no longer understands and therefore struggles to cope with, while, as collateral damage from this stifling situation, everything in his immediate world goes adrift: his wife who leaves him, their son suffering from autism. .

Here we find the solid foundation of his cinema: Vincent Lindon once again imperial, his art of mixing professional actors (Sandrine Kiberlain, Anthony Bajon), beginners (Marie Drucker, amazing) and non-professionals, his acuity in transcribing little lies and great humiliations of daily business life. But here he also plunges into the inner torments of his character, with a camera that moves away from documentary to more frankly embrace the codes of fiction. Another world is not another film but an essential piece of a puzzle far from being completed.

The moving speech by Vincent Lindon, president of the jury of the Cannes Film Festival