Movie review: The Measure of a Man finds dignity in small moments

By Jay Stone

There’s a scene near the beginning of the social/realist/French drama The Measure of a Man in which a middle-aged factory worker who has just been laid off from his job is having dinner with his wife and teenage son. At the table, the boy presents a riddle: how many drops of water can you put into an empty glass?

The answer, of course, is one, because after that it’s not empty any more. It’s an old brainteaser that nonetheless seems to have something to do with the film, which is a low-key study — quotidian in every respect — about the small agonies, humiliations, and failures of a person who is being left behind by a heartless economy. The Measure of a Man looks at how many drops of water you can take out of a glass before it is empty and the answer, of course, is all of them.

It also seems significant that the teenage son has cerebral palsy, so his father, Thierry (Vincent Lindon) sometimes has to bathe and dress him. It’s not a major part of the story. It’s just another drop of water.

The Measure of a Man (the French title is La Loi du Marche, which gives a fuller explanation of the world it inhabits) is made up of intimate moments, shot with documentary realism, between Thierry and the people he must deal with after loses his position as a machinist in a factory. A job-training centre has given him lessons as a crane operator, a skill that is useless in his job hunt. “You can’t mess with people,” he complains, but, of course, you can. His fellow workers want to sue the company that got rid of them, but he wants to forget it and move on. He undergoes a humiliating job interview on Skype (“Your chances are very slim,” the recruiter tells him. “Have a good day.”) He takes a course in how to be interviewed at which other classmates freely critique his body language, his open-necked shirt, the rhythm of his answers, his lack of a requisite “amiability.”

The movie was directed by Stephane Brize with a close-up attention that has become a hallmark of a certain kind of humanist European cinema; it evokes the work of the Dardennes brothers of Belgium, or British filmmaker Ken Loach in its lack of artifice and the immediacy of the storytelling. Conversations — ordinary moments of unremarkable decline — are filmed in what feels like real time, as, say, Thierry negotiates with a couple that might buy a mobile vacation home he can no longer afford and we see him gather up what remains of his sense justice to refuse to bring down the price a few hundred euros. Dignity is all here and Lindon — who won the best actor award at last year’s Cannes film festival — has a kind of hangdog self-possession that makes him someone to root for. He underplays Thierry’s desperation so skillfully that we are aroused to fill in the emotional spaces and thus become complicit in his tragedy.

It takes some work, and viewers who just want to sit back and see a drama played out before them may be frustrated by the movie’s amble. Nothing is spelled out; a scene of Thierry pushing his old car is followed by a scene of him on a bus, and we understand the small steps of his decline.

By the end, he is almost magically working again, as a security guard at a vast supermarket with an elaborate surveillance system. We watch over his shoulder as shoppers walk down aisles, picking up goods and putting them back in very suspicious ways. Soon we understand that suspicion is built into the very system; like Thierry we’re being co-opted into management. The shoplifters who are caught are a sad lot (“if I could pay for it I would”), but not as sad as the clerk seen misusing the store’s loyalty coupons, an irony that is also glanced over.

The Measure of a Man ends with a kind of statement of independence, a tiny objection to a giant and fixed game. There’s no grand gesture here — it isn’t that kind of movie — but it’s the answer to a different kind of riddle. How many drops of water can you put into a full glass before it overflows? The answer, of course, is one too many.

THE EX-PRESS, April 20

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