At Work
Drama • 2025 • 1h 32m
À Pied D’œuvre
This movie was screened on 82. Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica 2025
A successful photographer decides to abandon his career to devote himself to writing, facing uncertainty and poverty in order to pursue his authenticity and personal freedom.
“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
— Franz Kafka
À pied d’œuvre, directed by Valérie Donzelli, neither consoles nor embellishes: it imposes itself as a sharp question about existence through the transformation of its protagonist. An acclaimed photographer throws away lenses and sets, choosing paper and ink instead—the emptiness of the page in place of the polished surface of the image. The film, based on Franck Courtès’s autobiographical book, shows how every creative act, if authentic, becomes a gesture of resistance, a clean cut through the cage of habit.
The direction, stripped of frills, accompanies the protagonist in a voluntary descent into poverty, a space of lack that reveals what remains once the mask of constructed identity falls. The daily rhythm, made up of humble and degrading jobs, is not merely the loss of economic security, but a ritual of stripping down. It is not about private misfortune: what emerges is the shared fate of those sucked into a market that consumes, that replaces bodies and names, that erases dignity. Precariousness is not an episode but a condition, a terrain of collective alienation in which imagining a future becomes impossible.
Bastien Bouillon embodies this wearing-down with a gaze that never fully gives in, oscillating between irony and fragility. Around him there are no salvations: only figures who reflect, with indifference or judgment, the contradictions of a system that commodifies time and empties work of meaning. These presences are not background characters: they are reminders that solitude is not an individual choice but the consequence of invisible power relations.
The film’s style avoids rhetoric and locks itself into ruthless essentiality. Every suspended frame, every silence, marks a void that is not only interior but social: the void of those who live under the blackmail of necessity, exposed to need. In this way, the work becomes both an existential investigation and a political statement. Poetry is not an ornament, but a tool that lays bare exploitation and shows how daily survival erodes freedom.
The question the film leaves is brutal: how much is a life worth when spent trying to force a choice capable of tearing down social constructions and even family ties? Is it possible to start over without annihilating oneself, passing through misery and stigma? Donzelli offers no guarantees: renunciation may open the way to another existence, but the risk remains that the sacrifice will be sterile. And yet, the director reminds us that no rebirth is possible without acknowledging the collective dimension of loss, without naming professional, social, and intimate identity as a battlefield.
In the end, À pied d’œuvre is not an act of faith but a stance. To create means to bear witness against the reduction of life to a commodity, against precarious work that consumes bodies and erases horizons. There is no aesthetic redemption: only the necessity of defending dignity as the last margin of resistance. The misery the film shows is not an individual fault but the product of a devouring system. There is no aesthetic redemption: what remains is the bare necessity of defending one’s dignity, as the last ground of struggle.
“There is no passion to be found in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.”
— Nelson Mandela
This movie was in the official competition of 82nd Venice International Film Festival 2025
