It's a happy documentary coincidence, at the origin of a comical metaphor: positioned despite herself at the forefront of a women's football team from Val de Nièvre, the right-wing lawyer and columnist Sarah Saldmann narrowly misses scoring a goal, by unintentionally countering a failed clearance from the opposing defense. By filming Saldmann immersed for a week in different popular circles, wouldn't Gilles Perret and François Ruffin have given him the opportunity to score points? The question arises all the more during this football match located in the middle of the film, which ends with collective jubilation where the lover of luxury bags openly demonstrates complicity and tenderness towards her teammates of the day. Despite her excesses and the contempt for the poor which she demonstrates with aplomb on the sets of C8 and BFM, Saldmann would have a good background. She would even be nice “, if we are to believe the reactions of the workers whose daily life she shares, for a few hours, in Lyon, Boulogne-sur-Mer or Amiens.
For a certain time, the trap set by Perret and Ruffin in Get to work! seems to be turning against them. The columnist is aware of this and plays it with self-deprecation: exploiting her comic role, she also tells Ruffin that her outlook has changed, that she will no longer complain, for example, about a delivery man refusing to wait for her to leave. from his bath to receive his package. Disturbed by the living conditions of the people she calls, on BFM, “ bullet “, of the ” assisted » and “ lazy “, emotion overwhelms her even in the face of the moving testimony of a home caregiver, who praises her work of assisting the most vulnerable, while recalling the trying conditions of her job. “ You don't film when I cry! We will cut it during editing » she asks in front of Perret's camera. The request is strategic and it is, obviously, about understanding the opposite: film me when I cry because, after all, I also have a heart.
Ego galore
The self-demonization enterprise therefore works wonderfully, despite weak resistance from Ruffin, who repeats several times that he does not want to be the instigator of an operation of “ social tourism “. This is, however, the main limitation of the film, which follows the narrative structure of a tour of France among the proles (with boxes checked at the turn of certain dialogues to show a clear credential on feminism, racism, etc.), articulated around the columnist, who asserts herself as the central driving force of the comic device. Perpetuating the filmic egocentrism that has characterized him since Thanks boss!Ruffin often appears in competition with Saldmann to shine in front of Perret's camera, which he redirects on him by commenting on the situation or delivering a few dirty jokes – never funny. During conversations with the columnist, he continues to heavily emphasize what differentiates them, without realizing that he sometimes occupies a similar position. This is evidenced by a beautiful thought: a few minutes after the deputy affirms, during an exchange with an Afghan chef, that he never cooks, Saldmann confesses to not knowing how to cook an egg… Can we reinsert Ruffin? During a day spent in Grigny with apprentices in training, the deputy learned to connect a few optical fiber cables on the sidewalk, donning the same worker's costume as his companion to confirm that, decidedly, the subject of the experiment was double.
Smarter than he seems, Get to work! welcomes a salutary turnaround in its final third. The editing, which gradually eclipses Sadlmann in favor of Ruffin, prepared the ground: the columnist will end up ousted from the filming before the end of the immersion week, which explains the increasingly important presence on screen of her playing partner. After each day of work, Saldmann continued to utter filth on television about the insecurity in working-class neighborhoods or the ongoing massacres in Gaza (legitimate and proportionate, according to her), to the point that Perret and Ruffin considered it necessary to interrupt the experiment to emphasize the primary objective ofGet to work! : to highlight the most precarious and thereby give them dignity. This is the case with this cleaning lady who says she is ashamed of her teeth but hopes to get new teeth with the money earned from her current job, after years spent unemployed. In the last scene of the film, Perret and Ruffin find her: she then wears a big smile, proudly walking on the red carpet that they rolled out to celebrate, aping a Cannes ceremony, the people they met throughout the filming. While the columnist continues to spread her nauseating ideology on TV sets, the film will have been able to turn the touting device of immersion to its advantage: rather than seeking to reinstate Saldmann, it was simply necessary to fire her.
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