Handsome, black-haired, suited, Simon Kessler (Mathieu Amalric), born in Strasbourg, is the cigarette-smoking (aka mildly unconventional, intellectual and questioning) psychologist at SC Farb, the subsidiary, founded in 1929, of a German chemical-manufacturing company based near Paris, France. His job is to train executives 'making them soldiers, knights of the business world' by team-building, dances, raves, detailed assessments of their personalities - 'My goal is simple, to push our executives to the limit'. He's slightly in love with passionate dyed-black-haired Louisa (Laetitia Spigarelli), though naughty blonde-haired business-suited Isabelle (Delphine Chuillot) likes to snog him behind the filing cabinets and probably more.

Seedy tall 60s deputy managing director Karl Rose (Jean-Pierre Kalfon) suborns him to report secretly on managing director, elderly grey-goateed-and-moustached swept-back-grey-haired Mathias Jüst (Michael Lonsdale), who Mr Rose says is cracking up - citing Mr Jüst's secretary Lynn Sanderson (Valérie Dréville) as source, and noting his habit of regular hand-washing in his office sink. Wife Lucy Jüst (Edith Scob) supports this theory, revealing that her smoking-jacket-wearing cigarette-holder-toting husband keeps a pistol at their Louis-Quinze-furnished, light-blue-and-gold-panelled home, and has recently curled up near the cot of their dead daughter Aloïs, which Lucy Jüst keeps pristine and with a musical soft toy which she winds up and leaves to play. Long ago, Mathias Jüst (violin), Lynn Sanderson, company chemist Jacques Paolini (Rémy Carpentier) (cello) and since-departed sales rep Arie Neumann (Lou Castel) formed a classical music group, the Farb Quartet - playing German music and César Franck's second movement - which needs investigating. New company recruit Mr Tavera (Nicolas Maury) is nauseated by handling food, but keen to rise rapidly up SC Farb's ladder while cleaning down Simon's bare upper torso after all-night-rave excesses with cologne tissues he keeps in his back-pack.

But does all this mask a long-forgotten sub-plot about the gassing of members of an ethnic group in World War Two (1939-1945), with connections to the company's current executives and SC Farb's past, and parallels to the rounding up of asylum seekers on trains between France and Britain and discrimination against black French citizens in Paris? Are Karl Rose and Arie Neumann their real names, or have their names been changed for concealment - and does Mathias Jüst want to change his surname to his mother's, Schlegel? Do the parents of the company's executives have murderous pasts? Can all these plot strands and allegories knit together in a slow-crawling feature film lasting well over 2 hours?

Heartbeat Detector refers to devices apparently now installed to detect stowaways in vehicles, compares this to the construction of vehicles designed to gas people while driving along during World War Two. There's close study of documents describing construction details - the distribution of weight of live and dead bodies over axles, how to drain human fluids from the vehicle - all written in calm engineering instructions and design solutions. Anonymous letters are sent, and the assumption that they come from the descendants of the dead is not necessarily correct.

The original title La Question Humaine relates to what much of the film seems to be about - the role of the person in relation to the system; whether a person is more or less important than the success, the aims, of the organisation. Specifically it is quoted by Mathias Jüst - 'How do you reconcile the human factor with the company's need to make money?' - as he accepts the reduction of his staff from 2,500 to 1,200 - 'from 2,500 units to 1,200 units' as it is expressed - for the good of the company, as something he is aware of. Alcoholics - defective people - have been eliminated from the business - the dead wood. But the rising young executives - handsome, gorgeous, clean and fit - drink, take drugs, dance, kiss, party.

When Simon spends time with Louisa - who hates him smoking cigarettes - it's with her ethnic group in peace, listening quietly and formally - for example - to a poet singer (who goes on seemingly forever, and then some, with a look of intense meaning) who is musically unaccompanied, and followed by an elderly singer who is assisted by two guitars. Simon - astonishingly rudely perhaps - takes a phone call in the middle of this and leaves. He wants Louisa to sing to him, preferably naked, but no-one else to hear her, and gets violent with her while drugged. He wants her sexually; Louisa wants him sexually; she is fond of him; calms him, gets towards loving him, while understanding and accepting his deficits - 'You're cold, dark as a prism; yes, now I'm scared: my lover's a madman'. Simon seems to be disintegrating mentally, with flashes of extreme rage and worry - a half-sexual fantasy about touching elderly Lucy Jüst's neck; denying screaming 'Shut up you bitch' at office-friend Isabelle; suddenly visciously tugging her hair. But it's perhaps simply the extreme stress he shares with all his colleagues.

La Question Humaine is certainly a remarkable film, with extreme emotional power, but it's a messy jumble. There's a brilliant film inside it about exactly what industrial psychology can achieve - bad and good - in its manipulation, honing, of the corporate individual; and the excitingly, dangerously fantastical reality a company of focused, rising people lulled by personal ambition and submission within an organisation can create. This is told by gorgeous, exceedingly precise interior photography and stunning design - from clothes to cars to office sets; contrasting with naturalistic slightly washed-out colours for the exterior scenes from the real world outside. That story is told emotionally, with thoughts and almost-everyday dialogue, carefully chosen vignettes from life - men at urinals, people in lifts, chats in offices, dances, powerboats at night, meetings in flats, bars.

Added on to this are what feel like two more and separate extra films. One has a plot-line, as if director Nicolas Klotz and writers François Emmanuel and Elisabeth Perceval lost their way, and felt that they should add a rigid and tested story line. This plot-line story is about guilt at second-hand for the killing of people in the past, and change of identity to escape, blackmail. It doesn't particularly work, partly because it's not very credible; partly because it's such a huge separate subject that it needs the full rigorous attention of its own film - and there have been many masterpiece films doing exactly that.

The other is a set of small scenes and allusions, again seemingly tacked on - the removal of a particular ethnic group for searching by police from a café for example - drawing a comparison of the quest for corporate perfection with the persecution of ethnic minorities today. This is also a strongly arguable, contestible, comparison, which could make a robust film on its own.

Unfortunately, La Question Humaine throws everything in together, plus - a dreaded plot device when a film's plummeting out of control - a couple of dream sequences, both clichéd. The film ends on one. There's a device of a starting voice-over and ending voice-over added to the film, perhaps to try and give it a beginning and end. But this only detracts as a device from the potential powers of the film itself. The film stumbles into confusion, and limps to a damp, vague surrender of an ending. It would be great if this film was remade, with a beefed-up script confident that it was exploring the corporate soul; starting straight in without explanation or voice-over, and ending with a strong conclusion.

Credits: www.imdb.com/title/tt0765141/

END

John Park

reviewed Wednesday 3 October 07 / National Film Theatre - NFT2 - Press Preview - 10:30

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