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How can one make sense of the space of the massive store, the huge multi-channel bank of monitors, and all of the various shoppers who are moving targets in a war against "loss"? Thierry is expected to be a technocratic eye in the sky, something between an air traffic controller and a drone pilot. We see Thierry being trained not only on the policies and practices of store security, but on basic legibility.
The unfinished rail-and-girder ceilings of the warehouse architecture even allows for mobile cameras that can glide along tracks, controlled by remote joysticks within the security command center. As Brizé takes great pains to show us, every square centimeter of floor space in these stores is under surveillance. Once Thierry takes the job at Cora (one of several European hypermarket chains - in the U.S., our closest equivalent is Meijer, but the concept never really took hold over here), he becomes party to another form of social control. Usually, they are offered with a smile, as "helpful hints." These films, like Measure, are about the minute processes of bodily control that characterize the neoliberal workplace.
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In short, the group assesses him on a micro-biological level as if he were a potential Tinder swipe, emphasizing that Thierry's knowledge and experience are secondary to his semi-intangible "it factor." This is a subject that Farocki explored in his 1990 essay film How to Live in the Federal Republic of Germany, and observed in a more straightforward manner in his 1996 documentary Interview. He doesn't say "hello." He doesn't wear a closed-collar shirt. Later on, a group session at the unemployment agency analyzes a videotape of a mock interview by Thierry, and the other members (all presumably required, like Thierry, to participate in this session by law) proceed to critique Thierry's manner of presentation.
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We see Thierry undergo a job interview over Skype, only to be curtly informed by the interviewer, "You should know, you will not get this." Then the interview continues, pro forma, for two more excruciating minutes.
It is this half of the film that seems most directly inspired by Farocki's documentary style. The first half of The Measure of a Man shows Thierry working through the French unemployment system, a well-meaning but bureaucratically feckless process. However this is not to say that Brizé's English title is inapposite. He literally becomes The Law of the (Hyper) Market. Our protagonist, Thierry (Vincent Lindon), 18+ months after losing his job as a machinist (the company folded), takes a position as a store detective in a Cora hypermarket, watching monitors and questioning shoplifters. Unemployment, low wages, factory closures, all of these things are regrettable, we're told, but we can never disrupt the Law of the Market.īut there's an unexpected pun at work in writer-director Stéphane Brizé's title (and I will confess, I am not 100% certain that it works in French).
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Colloquially, the title is a purely economic statement: "the law of the market," the usual laissez-faire self-justification for whatever hardships the free enterprise system doles out. Farocki was a versatile artist, and working with Petzold no doubt allowed him to explore different parts of his creative personality, such as his extensive cinephilia.īut all other things being equal, if I were to imagine what Farocki's fixations and sensibilities might look like as applied to a narrative film, the result would strongly resemble The Measure of a Man, a work whose original French title, La loi du marché, captures both its subject matter and its eerily Farockian undertones more precisely. I've always found it interesting and a little odd that Harun Farocki worked with Christian Petzold on so many of his recent features, because on their surface, those films - The State I Am In, Ghosts, Barbara, and Phoenix - don't bear much resemblance to the documentaries and essay-films for which Farocki is known.
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