It is a well-known fact that meaningfulness does not necessarily require a long running time to exist in a movie. Nor does a long running time shield a movie-maker from shallowness or insignificance. The veracity of this statement is once again demonstrated by "Jour de chômage", a modest little movie in black and white, and very brief into the bargain (7 minutes), but one that definitely has something to say. Assuming that too many people think that being on the dole results from pure laziness or at least from lack of will, Sébastien Sort, the director and co-writer of "Jour de chômage", has made it his mission to break down their prejudices by putting before their eyes what an average day in the life of an unemployed worker is actually like. And, believe it or not, it is no bed of roses! For one thing, Christophe Aumont, our archetypal job seeker, cannot sleep late : at eight, he is (brutally) awakened by his alarm clock, which upsets him so much so that he has to go to sleep again in order to get over it! Only to be snapped out of sleep again by his worried Mum on the telephone. At eleven, Chistophe busies himself opening rejection letters and half an hour later he has a stressful time trying vainly to contact a potential employer. The beginning of the afternoon is even worse as he is pestered by a couple of Jehovah's Witnesses while he is expecting a potentially decisive phone call. A call that will prove fruitless naturally. At 7 p.m., he is so exhausted that he sleeps again , having nightmares about... telephones! And so on, and so on... Of course this is a comedy where overstatement is rife. Exaggeration is indeed a device effective at provoking laughter, although in the present case the laughs are rather forced. Since, exaggerated or not, the facts are there: people registered as unemployed with a job centre are anything but on vacation. If they really want to land a job, then their daily lives become synonymous with wait, stress, constraint and frustration, even more so today than in 1997 given the way the employment situation has deteriorated. A kind of message usually delivered in a serious, dramatic or accusatory tone. Not here. Humor does the job and quite as well in fact, maybe even better. At any rate, the light tone in no way prevents the point from biting home, on the contrary. Simply humor, even black, helps the medicine go down... Jean-Noël Brouté is amusing as poor Christophe, the epitome of joblessness, in this well-made short deftly mixing entertainment and food for thought. There are worse ways to spend seven minutes of your life, aren't they?
