Un autre monde

Improve what you can, remove what you can’t. Risk spreading, cost reduction, flexible shell, lean and mean, market forces – just a few of the boardroom mantras.

Philippe Lemesle (Vincent Lindon), CEO of the French subsidiary of an American multinational has to accommodate the shareholders’ desire for cost-cutting and profit-maximisation. How these demands can be met is unclear? The marching orders provided by the board are rather contradictory.

Trapped Lemesle, a man with a sense of responsibility who – due to the workload – hardly participates in his family life with his wife Anne (Sandrine Kiberlain) and children becomes completely trapped: can he still prevent a divorce?

Un autre monde was screened in competition at the 2021 Venice Film Festival and is the concluding part of the work trilogy by director Stéphane Brizé (1966); the other two being En guerre (2018) and La loi du marché (2015).

Brizé investigates labour market structure under neoliberalism; to what extent does the primacy of market forces and meritocracy threaten our happiness? Have we definitively succumbed to the shareholders?