“Regaining control”: a farcical social comedy

THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – TO SEE

We know the Haut-Savoyard Gilles Perret for a long time, through the tireless filmed archeology of the memory and the militant struggles of a region which also hosted some great deeds of the Resistance during the Occupation, whose transmission both of the moral lesson that the social program holds at the heart of the director. Himself the son of a CGT worker, the director has never hidden, in doing so, on which side of the class his heart leans. Walter, back in resistance (2009), Happy Days (2013)The Social (2016) thus mark his filmography, which we felt, in recent years, that it was seized by a desire to broaden the frame. The rebel (2018) then I want sun ! (2019), respectively shot alongside Jean-Luc Mélenchon and François Ruffin, testified to this.

Another possible way, even more radical: the change of genre and the storming of fiction. It is today that what must be called a great plunge takes place, when one comes, like Perret, from the social documentary. Without a doubt Takeover is itself a frank social comedy, suggesting that one should not make a mountain of a simple change of noun. But the mountain, it is not Perret who will disagree, it is better to know it. This is why, welcoming this new film with as much interest in the challenge as equanimity in the analysis, we are happy to say that it works rather very well, as routine as the subject has now become.

It will therefore be, as you have guessed, a social plan in a high-precision mechanical factory in Haute-Savoie, taken over by an investment fund. Here are the main actors: Cédric (Pierre Deladonchamps), bar turning worker in a high precision factory; Philippe (Rufus), his retired working father, right in his union boots; Céline (Laetitia Dosch), a high school friend and class defector who moved to the management side; Alain (Grégory Montel), childhood friend, bank employee in the village; Denis (Vincent Deniard), another childhood friend, who tries to keep his small business head above water; Chantrel (Samuel Churin), the boss, mercenary of big capital who is only looking to save his own skin; Frédéric (Finnegan Oldfield), a long-armed young trader who climbs in the region.

Nth degreasing

We take the thing at the time when an English pension fund covets the company, which remains efficient despite the tensions of a just-in-time work, and quietly prepares yet another degreasing with the consent of the management in place. Thanks to Céline in the place, Cédric quickly knows what to expect. He comes to think that the only solution consists in presenting himself as a credible buyer and buying the factory, by setting up a funambulistic financial arrangement with the complicity of his friends and the young woman, who is increasingly in trouble. comfortable in her place. Started, in a somewhat worrying way, in the straight line of a Laurent Cantet (Human ressources, 2000) or a Stéphane Brizé (In war, 2018), the film picks up its cruising speed by turning to the more farcical side of a Kervern-Delépine (Louise Michel, 2008) or a Pierre Jolivet (The Very Very Large Company, 2008).

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