Aniel

This film is a puzzling French short that focuses on what happens to a small group of factory workers after Aniel, a foreign worker who can barely speak a word of French, is hired at the factory. Young and boyishly handsome, he affects everyone around him: women take an instant like to him and men resent him. The resentment felt by the men is fairly puzzling since Aniel is very reserved and is quiet almost to the point of being mute. Thus, he poses no threat or competition as far as women are concerned. Affected most of all by Aniel is Marc, a straight, macho, married man, who is mightily perturbed by the quiet, shy Aniel to the point that his life is turned upside down and thrown into chaos. At one point, I caught myself thinking that perhaps Aniel was an alien from outer space but I decided that he was probably human and that the strange goings on in the film were indicative of an inscrutable French sensibility or, less charitably, a result of poor writing or truncated character and plot development due to trying to fit in too much into a 23-minute film.