International Competition

Here are a few points from the rule book for job interviews: wash and brush your hair, wear some pretty make-up (if you’re a woman), do not wear sneakers, do not sit down before you’re asked to and, whatever happens, never be too honest. Easy, right? Not if you’re twenty, French and have trouble fitting into a mold, let alone the mold presented to you by a government-backed employment agency. Lolita once stabbed her classmate in the eye with a compass because she got fed up with him. Hamid wants to kill his brother. Kevin’s shortcoming is that he neither wants to market himself nor be bothered to travel too far for work, especially if the pay is crap. The agency people talk of job hunting as a personal, professional project. The goals of the agency and those looking for work might be similar but teaching and learning the tricks proves to be difficult. Claudine Bories and Patrice Chagnard have crafted a topical and tragicomic film in which the customer is sometimes wrong. But the system is not right either.