La question humaine

I really did want to appreciate this movie for tackling a series of monumental subjects - corporate dehumanization, guilt by association (especially concerning the Holocaust), Orwellian destruction of meaningful language, and the fallibility of psychoanalysis. However, watching this made me realize why the similarly dense subject material from novelists like Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon rarely make it to the big screen is that they are much too diffuse, internal, and cerebral to even attempt in the plot-action-event world of film. I love film, and I love ideas, but all good film (even the most arty and pretentious) is about action first and ideas second. This film starts with the ideas and never lets the characters out from under them. A movie should never be about words, just as a novel should never have directions for camera angles.

I can't make a conclusive evaluation of whether I loved it or hated it, so I give it a 5 out of 10. It fails in doing the impossible, so I have to give it some credit. This movie is a prime example of why some novels should never be made into films.

This is an interesting movie. The pace is slow, and the subject is painful, so it takes some effort to watch it from end to end. But in the end, it's worth it.

The music is very effective in inducing empathy with the main character, who's going through a life-changing crisis.

The main point is that today's corporate speak is dehumanizing ('units' to designate workers, 'efficiency', 'objectives'), in the same way as the Nazi's ruthless technical language of death was. Language can be a tool of destruction with a clean conscience.

Not perfect - a bit over-obvious sometimes. Also, the people speak like books, which, for me, induced a distance and made suspension of disbelief harder. Good acting though.

I understand why some people object to this movie's equating the plight of illegal immigrants and exploited factory workers with the Shoah (the Holocaust).

The Jewish people are at this moment at greater risk than they have been since the Germans exterminated them in Europe during World War II. They are surrounded by hordes of brutal, ruthless monsters no less dedicated to their destruction than the Germans were 70 years ago.

But it's worse now, because they are effectively all alone against a force thousands of times larger than they are (billions against a few million), with NOBODY on their side, not even their former official "Protectors", the British.

During the Shoah, most civilized countries supported the Jews' right to exist (in theory, at least); but now the whole world prefers the Palestinians, whose declared aim is the total destruction of Israel. Israel's only remaining friends - the Americans - currently seem more interested in courting Israel's enemies than in insuring Israel's survival.

Anybody who says the nation Israel is not the same as the Jewish people is either criminally deluded or a liar. Israel's enemies hate it because it's Jewish. Period. If they could wipe out the Jews all over the world they'd do it gleefully, but Israel is a much more convenient target, an isolated, vulnerable surrogate for the whole.

In the light of this alarming situation, to compare France's arresting illegal immigrants to Germany's systematically murdering Jewish children is appalling. Nevertheless... I was bowled over by this movie.

It is a deceptively powerful movie - deceptive because it seems to amble so slowly and randomly toward its conclusion; powerful because it makes old news new and vitally important. Instead of cheapening the Shoah, for me it made that horror realer than I thought possible after a long lifetime of learning about it.

I DON'T think the current plight of illegal immigrants (or Palestinians, who are a particularly rapacious sort of illegal immigrant) is anything like the Jews' plight during the war, but this movie doesn't force me to accept that absurdity. It makes what was done to the Jews real, and it strengthens my commitment to Israel's survival rather than diluting it.

I last saw Mathieu Amalric as Jean-Do in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Winner of a César for that performance and two others, he is an accomplished actor. He displays his considerable skills in this film, which has him in the role of a psychologist who must interpret words and actions of others.

He is charged with assessing the mental state of the company CEO, Mathias Jüst, played brilliantly by Michael Lonsdale, who has two César nominations himself, and a BAFTA nomination for the 1973 version of The Day of the Jackal. This occurs soon after the company undergoes a massive downsizing.

The verbal give and take between the two was captivating. It became really interesting when Jüst sprung upon him that he knew he was being investigated, and gave information the reached back to the Third Reich.

The involvement of the principles in the extermination of Jews was reveled in a way that was similar to the discussion of the reduction of employees in the company. People were referred to as loads or units in each case, not as humans.

The inhuman language of extermination becomes the inhuman language of business, and the children of the Reich are left to deal with their father's sins.

Powerful.

La question humaine is a difficult movie, not entertaining, but very rewarding. It gets slowly under your skin and makes you reflect about who you are, who we are, what our parents, have transmitted us generation after generation. Basically, it is a movie about transmission, about languages, about words that echo across time.

That's why I believe it is simplistic to say that Nicolas Klotz and scenarist Elizabeth Perceval are comparing the way companies are managed today to the way the shoah was "managed". They are much more subtle than that. What Elizabeth says in the interview which accompanies the DVD is something close to this: "When Simon is reading the technical report written during the war by Theodor Jüst, he is touched by the words used, the structure of the sentences, their cold, technical tones, of which he finds echoes in his own industrial psychologist language." In a similar vein, on wikipedia, you can find the following quote by Nicolas, in French, which says something similar. As Nicolas himself says, there is something hazy, "gazeux" about the film, about these "résurgences" from the past. Which, again, does not mean that industrial companies like SC Farb (reference the product used in gas chambers) are modern-day gas chambers...

There are many beautiful, touching, although painful moments in this movie. I think in particular of Lynn's account (Valerie Dreville) of Matthias Jüst, discovering when he was young the atrocities committed by his father. She says she was in love with the boy he once was. Then he had the courage to confront his father. As an older, powerful man, CEO of a large business unit, he seemed to have lost that kind courage.