It’s early days on Venice Film Festival, but there seems to be a growing theme for the dehumanizing nature of work during late capitalism (See also: “Bugonia” and “no other choice”). The French actress A director Valérie Donzelli has a very specific riff on this theme in “A Pied d’oeuvre (the English title is literally”At work“), Her modern riches-to-tissue stories about a man who gives up life as a successful, well-interrupted photographer in Paris to scrape a living as a relaxed worker and use his free time stressful Becoming a writer his children wants to read.
Paul (Bastien Bouillon) takes a hammer to plaster when we meet him, because the life he used to know is to be crushed into pieces. At the age of 42, he has changed creative lanes from being a photographer who withdraws € 3,000 to € 8,000 a month to being a writer who has already spent the progress on his compromising third book. At the same time, his latest ex-wife (Donzelli) has moved to Montreal with his son and daughter and Paul has moved out of his big house to a small studio. His thin veil account of the division of their marriage, “the story of the end” which his agent considers countless. If being a good writer means living in such a way that the material generates itself, then Paul’s life and calling is both in need of a review.
Paul wants to find the kind of work that leaves him enough time to write, and that is how he ends up on the “Jobbing” website, sets up a profile and lists his manual work/ handyman skills. Donzelli’s Oflashy direction style has a rapid simplicity and lets observation details play without emphasizing them, so that mild comical moments could just as easily make you grimace in recognition. The little ghost of a smile that Paul performs to his webcam to take two of his profile picture is the world in a grain of sand, which reflects the fact that it is not enough for people to sell their work, they must seem to come out a deep sense of well -being from within, say, disassemble a mezzanine or cut your lawn.
This is a movie parked in the minute of Paul’s new work culture and is adapted to the fact that when your work is underpaid you can never get enough of it. Members of the job website are pinged when a job within their skill is listed, at which time it is a bid war to the bottom when workers set their prices all-long. Paul usually offers € 20 for jobs that take hours, which means that his interest rate is not anywhere near the steering house with minimum wage.
Still, as he reflects, he has a beginner’s zeal to make this system work, and that gives him an advantage compared to more franchise workers with a long -term dependence on it. Adapted from an autobiographical novel by Frank Courtes is the film in the trenches of Paul’s personal experience while retaining the perspective that most people who turn to jobs do so of desperation rather than idealism. Unlike the migrant workers he competes with for jobs, Paul is still in the motty of humble monthly royalties. “200-300 € per month is not poverty, but it gives a clear picture of it,” he writes. Although Paul has a relatively privilege here, the relative privilege does not pay the heating bills and it is clear – by glimpse of degradation that occurs with increasing frequency – that our hero flirts with ruin.
The people around him touched him for his choices, his sister says he is not a “real” poor person and asks why he does not get another job. Paul’s verbalization of idealism as silent engines under both the film and its protagonist, says “Some slaves are well paid today.” He has tasted the life that a corporate creative job can buy and has found that it is missing. His newly found precarity is not romanticized, it is presented as the necessary alternative to a less suitable path. He takes Robert Frost’s road less traveled in the hope that it will make all the difference.
Halfway through the film, he has a meeting with the man he used to be, that is, in his capacity as a driver, he picks up a man he knew from the photography world. During dinner, this man, who still has a well -paid job, offers a large house and Luxe Travels, a graceful understanding of what his former comrade does and contrasts with his own “Hyper consumption … you cut down, that’s good.”
The narrow story frame is sub -war of a tight, eloquent script by Valérie Donzelli and Gilles Marchand (whose previous writing credits include Cannes 2025 titles “Enzo” and “Case 137”). Ring of Lived Experience prevents or does not work this clear depiction of a man whose desire for freedom can see him free fall to another trap: poverty.
Practically a one-man show, Bouillon carries the film with the help of the type of face that looks different from all angles. His customers are curious about him. “You don’t look at the part,” says a woman when he arrives at his cable knit sweater and Ugglas to construct her armoire. The glimpses from the people he meets in this new line of work feed his written imagination and he reconstructs them on the page. Fear that the story will end in a cliché, with Paul who writes a book about being poor that makes him rich again, is thankfully unfounded because the film skillfully avoids such a trap.
If this modest fable feels small in a competition dominated by filmmakers that swing for the fence, it is not for a lack of substance. Full of thrown insights into the microclimate in a particular hell economic landscape, “at work” is an engaging story about a man trying to write an engaging story with a diamond of hard -win wisdom in its core.
Rating: B+
“At work” premiered at 2025 Venice Film Festival. It is currently seeking US distribution.
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