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En jouant Dans la compagnie des hommes
2003 Drama
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Director:
Arnaud Desplechin
Starring: Sami Bouajila, Jean-Paul Roussillon, Wladimir Yordanoff, László Szabó, Anna Mouglalis |
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Summary
A filmmaker intends making a film adaptation of a play by Edward Bond
entitled "In the company of men". To that end, he gathers
together several actors for screen tests and rehearsals which he
films. The film is about men in big business, about the
stratagems they employ in achieving their ends. The main
character is Leonard, the adopted son of an important businessman named
Jurrieu. Unused to the world in which he now finds himself,
Leonard is drawn into a battle between two industrialists – his father,
who runs an armaments company, and Hammer, the head of an international
distribution company. Unwittingly, Leonard becomes the pawn in
Hammer’s unscrupulous game of corporate politics...
Credits
 More French Drama |
Review
En jouant Dans la compagnie des hommes
is the cinematic equivalent of an army assault course – tough,
challenging and most definitely not for the faint-hearted. The
subject is not without some interest, although admittedly not everyone
would be motivated to sit through a two-hour long film about corporate
battles. However, Arnaud Desplechin’s treatment of it is
demanding in the extreme. Anyone who finds Jean-Luc Godard’s
films of the 1980s and 1990s hard-going is advised to give this film a
very wide berth. Whilst the film has a great deal of
originality in the way it is shot and constructed, it is singularly
lacking in charm and feels horribly like a shallow exercise in
cinematic intellectualism for the sake of it. The
performances – which are generally pretty good – are stifled by the
extremely self-conscious artistry in the filming and editing, and the
end result fails to satisfy either as film drama or as an attempt at
deconstructed cinematic art.
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