En jouant Dans la compagnie des hommes (2003) - film review

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...

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.

© James Travers 2008

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