"Another World" opens with Philippe (Vincent Lindon), the husband, and his wife Anne (Sandrine Kimberlain) negotiating the terms of their divorce. Philippe is the senior manager of some generic multinational company, Anne is the forgotten long-suffering wife.
Stéphane Brizé -or as I personally nicknamed him the French Ken Loach- is certainly my discovery of the year. In a span of one decade, his movies, deprived of any pretension of stylishness, worked as fictional documentaries if a crisis-stricken France, about ordinary people with ordinary predicaments and trying to find a way to make ends meet with a modest share of self-satisfaction. Are his characters happy by the end? Far from, but their life choices make us question ours and even viewers happy with their lives will realize that sometimes it's all about life circumstances and even the content of your wallet don't buy you immunity against a turn of luck.
Set in the world of management, "Another World" can be regarded as the third of an 'corporate' trilogy started with "The Measure of a Man" and followed by "At War". In the first film, Lindon played a man trying to find a job and ultimately getting one as a security guard where he realized that sometimes employees skimmed off the top, he wasn't the kind of man to 'denounce' one but if he wanted to keep the job, he had to. That was the dilemma of survival. In "At War", Brize made the anger more collective, forging the illusion that solidarity could create a force capable to rollercoast its way over the patronizing pettiness of capitalism. However the battle would be lost at the altar of internal conflicts and a problem of image when workers would shed the first blood. In the first film, you couldn't talk, in the second, no one heard you.
In "Another World", once again, no matter how coherently you talk, you might as well be blabbering. Whether Philippe with his future ex-wife or union representatives, there are more in the dynamics that handicap communication. People are simply not looking at the same direction. It's all about trying to protect your interests while persuading the others that you are right except that this time judgement is also clouded by resentment and its tendency to distort the truth in favor of your own vision. Basically, Anne blames Philippe for having invested too much of her time to a man who dedicated his last two years for the company. Is she right? Maybe so. Is he? Too. I quit my job to join my ex-wife in another country "out of love" and not to be too far from my daughter. It was definitely not the rational choice, we got divorced anyway and I didn't get any medal.
The bottom-line of that opening interview is that both are wrong and right and when it comes to personal matters and as the voices start rising you can tell the nervousness of the lawyars, Brize exposes us to the only truth about truth, it's all relative and with personal feelings, it's as cloudy as a lie. I trusted Philippe wouldn't be the kind of man to use his workplace stress as an excuse and so I was glad we could get a glimpse on his professional life, and as it seems, the struggle is still the same wherever your place in the company organizational chart. But Kimberlain surprisingly vanishes from the screen except for one scene where they do reconcile. Still, as it turns out that the private life doesn't occupy much of the screentime except to show a mutual struggle with their mentally-impaired son Lucas (Anthony Bajon).
I won't say I was disappointed by that but after watching "At War" and "The Measure of a Man", I was ready to get new insights on divorce, especially since I did live that situation. Or maybe because I just saw "A Few Hours of Spring", I expected Brize to handle the 'human' failure of communications that don't depend on financial matters. Don't get me wrong, the inside look on management and i(z little manigances are spot on and the dialogues really convinced me on the eternal shift between those who lead the show and those who 'play'. Basically the top management incarnated by Marie Drucker follow the rules set by the Americans and has only one obsession: remaining competitive. It's interesting they insist on that because that's the whole issue, if you consider competition as the measure of success, then any cost-cutting decision even if it implies firing people, remains rational.
However workers want to keep their jobs, which is an understandable priority. Philippe is caught in the crossfire between the human and material and seems to find a solution that combines both: asking the top managers to renounce their dividends. They refuse for various reasons: one lost his soul in a dead-end though lucrative job and feels entitled to bite the carrot that made him move forward, one doesn't want troubles with the hierarchy. The screenplay is so rich of events and great dialogues for the corporate parts that I wish it could invest a little more on the personal life. As Philippe, Lindon remains a man we want to trust, a man of honor and integrity and he truly is, but for some reason he committs one gaffe that I found a little too-far fetched.
Was it exhaustion? Did he want to get himself fired? Or was it just sheer confusion because this world would turn anyone into insanity. In "Platoon" they said "hell is the impossibility to reason", referring to war, we got it with "At War" , "Another World" is about the impossibility to reason but it does feel a little redundant. It has great performances and Lindon is as usual perfectly cast but it's obvious that Brize made an 'easy film'... by his own standards of excellence.
