Starting from the workaday banality of bustling city streets, of crowds, trains, platforms, buses, and the cold frustration of traffic-clotted roads, Pialat unleashes an autobiographical story (spoken in voice-over by Jean-Loup Reynold) that amounts to a long-stifled cry of rage.
With journalistic indignation, Pialat shows the plight of immigrant laborers living tightly packed in shantytown firetraps close to posh Paris neighborhoods. He uses statistics to document such inequalities as the paucity of educational opportunities, but his catalogue of hardships, as the title hints, is as philosophical as it is sociological: it is a study in existential agony, progressing from foreclosed childhood to benumbed adulthood to retirement in the shadow of death.
[
add
]
[
|
|
...
]