V Alérie Donzelli has given us a strange mix of realism and strange naivety in this film, based on the autobiographical novel by French photographer turned novelist Franck Courtès. There are some interesting insights into the gig economy, but some very clichéd and unbelievable depictions of what it takes to become a literary author.
With a kind of unwavering, endearing placidity, Bastien Bouillon plays someone who (like Courtès) gave up a highly successful photography career to pursue his financially precarious dream of becoming a serious writer. We get one shot early on of all his cameras on a shelf: he’s supposedly not selling any to ease his financial woes, but we never see or hear of these prized objects again.
Bouillon has already had what the French call a Succès d’estime with a few well-reviewed but under-selling books, and his publisher (Virginie Ledoyen) tells him he needs to get some serious sales; she’s not enthusiastic about his new manuscript and refuses to push him any more money. Bouillon’s wife and children have moved on, a situation he accepts with the same uneasy emptiness as everything else. So he’s forced to move to a cheaper place and take a part-time job to pay the bills while he works tirelessly on his magnum opus; he deliberately chooses a menial, meaningless job to erode the dignity of his new calling as a serious author. He never quite answers the question of why he doesn’t just pursue a literary career, like teaching. Perhaps his pride will keep him from doing so.
So, using a taskrabbit-type site where employees are humiliatingly undercutting each other in an attempt to do various manual labor jobs for low wages, he scrapes a depressing living. But with a terrible inevitability, he turns out to be writing a heartfelt book about what that existence is like, with vignettes of all these micro-workers who, of course, have a right to work. Did the court really hand over a bunch of various handwritten notebooks to his publisher — not writing it himself, no agent, nothing like that? Did he really continue to do online gig work even after it was published?
Well, maybe: although his film deal certainly implies that this era is at an end. After all, that is the hallmark of novel and fiction, and, as they say, there is no swearing by details. In any case, the film, while eventful enough, does not quite succeed in its quiet assertion of an exploration of poverty; the author behaves like a student stoically accepting some temporary accommodation.
