Here is a film featuring a main character that many of us can identify with. Bush's "ownership society" played out to enrich the One Percent, bankrupted the banks which were subsequently bailed out by us, causing unemployment to skyrocket and since then has disappeared many off the unemployment rolls and others onto low paid future-less jobs. This film is about a character who is in the latter situation.
Midway through the quiet emotional storms in the French drama “The Measure of a Man,” the hero, Thierry, begins working as a supermarket security guard. It’s a bitter victory. There is little that’s secure about the job, which requires Thierry to view not just every customer but also each employee as a potential thief. Supplemented with the trappings of the badly paid — a stifling tie, ill-fitting jacket, squawking walkie-talkie — he embodies 21st-century labor at its most heroically alienated. As he stands and watches, liberty seems a distant promise, as do equality and fraternity.
This is a tragic story about a worker that has been repeated many millions of times over the history of the boom-and-bust system of capitalism.
