Early One Morning

Anyone who works in the banking sector, or any other corporate environment for that matter, may want to add a star to this painfully on-the-nose drama about loyal, old-school clerk, Paul (the brilliant Jean-Pierre Darroussin, France’s answer to Billy Bob Thornton), who one morning decides he’s mad as hell and he’s not going to take it anymore. Jean-Marc Moutout’s film unfolds in flashback, as he charts the effect that a pair of pitiless corporate fixers (Yannick Renier and a scenery chewing Xavier Beauvois) have on both an accounting firm fallen on bad times and Paul’s mental wellbeing. From the phony masquerade of inter-work chumminess, down to the callous disregard for anything bar numerically-gauged efficiency, there’s lots here to recognise. Yet its lazy divisions of good versus evil means it lacks the chilling precision of films like Laurent Cantet’s ‘Time Out’ or ‘Human Resources’.