Rien de personnel (2009) - film review

A large pharmaceuticals company arranges a lavish reception for its employees, ostensibly to launch a new product.  In the course of the evening it becomes apparent to the attendees that this is in fact a training exercise for the company’s managers.  But is it more than that?  With the company rumoured to be heading for a takeover its employees are going to have to fight tooth and nail to keep their jobs...

Director Mathias Gokalp makes an impressive feature debut with this chilling yet darkly humorous satire on corporate ruthlessness.  Although written before the present economic crisis, Rien de personnel seems highly pertinent for our times and offers an acerbic yet very astute reflection on the brazen manner in which corporations habitually treat their staff in their mindless pursuit of maximum profitability.  Not only is the film highly topical, it is also imaginatively scripted and directed and reveals in Gokalp a writer-director auteur with considerable flair and insight.

Rien de personnel makes good use of what has become a somewhat hackneyed narrative device - repeating again and again the same pattern of events from different perspectives.  Akira Kurosawa famously used this technique in his Samurai masterpiece Rashomon (1950), and various other distinguished filmmakers (from Alain Resnais to Stanley Kubrick) have used it since, with varying degrees of success.  The same multiple-perspective approach seems fitting for Gokalp’s film as it emphasises the many contrasting facets that go up to make a corporation and drives home the fallacy of drawing conclusions from a single point of view.  It is striking how drastically our impressions are changed by some very subtle changes to what we are shown.  How easily we can be deceived by what we see, or rather what we are led to see.   

Gokalp directs the film with flair and economy and is well-served by his highly distinguished cast.  With an ensemble that includes actors of the calibre of Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Denis Podalydès, Zabou Breitman and Pascal Greggory, it is hard to see how Rien de personnel could fail to be an absorbing divertissement.   By situating the entire film in one location, Gokalp not only underscores the artificiality of the world of big business - stressing its implacable rules and uncompromising lack of compassion - but also makes his characters resemble pieces on a chessboard, all positioning themselves for greatest personal advantage.  It is only when the protagonists feel themselves under threat that they begin to assert their identity and realise how dismally phoney and soulless is the world to which they have committed themselves.  There’s no place for a conscience in the corporate world, and even less place for a heart.  Business is business.

© James Travers 2011

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