French Film’s Slight Take on the Gig Economy

French actress turned director Valérie Donzelli made a splash in 2011 with her whimsical and deeply personal second feature, Declaration of War, which caused a major buzz at Cannes and went on to be a local hit both critically and commercially. But since then, her output has varied from a costumed misfire (Marguerite & Julien) to a rather trifling comedy (Notre Dame) to a well-performed if one-note domestic abuse drama (Just the Two of Us).

Donzelli hasn’t quite found the mojo again of her first movie, although she’s a revered-enough auteur in France to get the money to keep trying. In some ways her thoughtful if not entirely thrilling new film, At Work (À pied d’oeuvre), is about that very subject: Chronicling the efforts of a respected though far from bestselling 42-year-old writer, Paul (Bastien Bouillon), to pen a successful third novel and somehow make a buck while doing so, the movie is about what happens when creativity butts heads with the hard facts of life — especially life in the hyper-capitalistic gig economy we now live in.

The script, which was written by Donzelli and Gilles Marchand (The Night of the 12th), is structured like a workplace drama, except that the workplace consists of various Paris apartments and homes where Paul earns a meager salary as a freelance handyman. Using a fictional app called Jobber, he bids for gigs by constantly lowering his rate, making peanuts to fix someone’s toilet, mow their lawn or hang a painting on the wall.

It’s an intriguing storyline that speaks to the precarious dog-eat-dog situation so many people find themselves in today — one in which there are only a handful of winners (mainly, those who create the apps and sell them), while everyone else struggles to get by.

The problem in At Work is that this really is the only storyline, and it’s not quite enough to sustain a feature. Paul doesn’t have any friends to confide in, while his ex-wife (Donzelli) and kids have moved far away to Montreal. Meanwhile his father (André Marcon) disparages his son’s choice to be a writer and be broke all the time, while Paul’s publisher (Virginie Ledoyen) is an ice-cold Parisian who only cares about selling books.

He’s basically on his own, trying to write about his failed love life when he’s not drifting from job to job, including borrowing a family car to twilight as an Uber driver. The portrait of a gig worker thrashing to stay afloat recalls last year’s powerful migrant drama, The Story of Souleymane, which followed an African food deliverer in Paris. But that film’s hero was facing a major, life-changing decision concerning his bid for political asylum, whereas Paul is just, well, trying to write a book no one will probably read.

The stakes seem fairly low in Donzelli’s latest, even if the director offers up some well-observed scenes focusing on France’s social divide — between those who can sit home on their laptops and those they hire for chump change to prune the plants outside. When Paul eventually decides to switch plots and write about the world of exploitation he’s now a part of, the big twist comes as no surprise to anyone but him. Still, the film delivers an honest enough ending by showing how another novel won’t necessarily save him.

Always an adept director of actors, Donzelli coaxes a good turn out of Bouillon (Leave One Day), who plays a man with strong principles but pretty weak strategies on how to enact them. We learn that Paul was once a successful photographer making ten times what he’s made off his books, yet he persists in trying to be a writer. Fair enough, but the problem is that such a choice feels too minor to make us care each time he fails.

At Work does feature one moving sequence in which Paul finally connects with his son on the other side of the Atlantic, allowing him find to some fulfilment in all he’s been trying to accomplish. Still, it feels like too little, too late, in a movie that mostly concentrates on the professional, whereas it’s the personal that ultimately interests us.

Shot in a colorfully naturalistic style by Irina Lubtchansky (My Golden Days), the film occasionally switches to what looks like Super 8mm, capturing the action more intimately and playfully. For a movie primarily about the dregs of modern life, what’s most admirable about At Work is how it never succumbs to pure miserablism, leaving us with the feeling that if Paul has somehow found a way to adapt to a brand new world, perhaps so can we.