She's One of Us (2003) User Reviews

Comme ci, comme ca

[correcamino · 6/10 · 6 September 2006]

Will the person who understands why protagonist Christine Blanc killed her temp agency boss please clap twice -- silently and in slow motion? I for one did not. As someone who has temped a LOT, I can say that the first, pre-murder part rang true. However, the notion of alienation and impersonalness in an office, as a temp, is starting to wear a bit thin. Or at least become extremely predictable. Nevertheless, I can usually be lulled into a hearty round of self-pity. Especially if I am in the capable hands of even an adequate French director. The French have a way of seeing cinematically that is so interesting and different. They can evoke emotions so effortlessly in their shots, and always without words.

In some ways, the director captured the temp/perm dilemma perfectly: temp, and you feel a bit outside of everything; once you are permanent, you are so busy and things change to such an extent that it is not funny. Or maybe I am just massively projecting.

I'm afraid this one was just so-so for me.

she's one of us

[dbdumonteil · 7/10 · 18 March 2007]

Christine Blanc (Sasha Andrés) is a young woman whose name answers to her personality. She's a stalwart temporary secretary who correctly earns a livelihood and however she looks absent to her surrounding. She's also well aware that her life is empty until the day she strikes up a friendship with Patricia (Catherine Mouchet) who searches jobs for her. But this friendship brutally comes to an end when one day at the swimming pool, Christine kills her. From then onwards, everything is fine for her: she passes her driving test, she has a more steady and lucrative job, she has a lover and however these aren't rational consequences of the horrendous act she committed...

I must acknowledge that I was very taken with this daunting work shot by Siegfrid Alnoy which is likely to travel for a long time in my mind. If she aimed at shaking our reassuring convinced ideas about society, work and leisure, she admirably succeeded in her task. Blur, ambiguity to tell Christine's outlandish adventure, her position in the world and personality are her best weapons. Like the Degas police officer, one is very intrigued by this idiosyncratic woman and although the director offers us a few clues likely to shed more light on her personality (see the sequence in the restaurant between the two characters), she keeps all her mystery from this perspective. Even before the murder, she seems elusive to the eyes of the audience: does she reject the world or does the world reject her? And after the murder, see the glaring contrast: a numb, senseless Christine Blanc superseded a wan one.

Beyond Christine Blanc's ascension, "Elle est Des Nôtres" raises serious problems about a ravenous consuming society and a heartless world of work. It holds a deeply pessimist vision about its members who consummate as much as they can, who are driven by the laws of market economy and don't remember human values any more. It is to Alnoy's credit that this nearly inhumane world could be ours. How chilling...

Thanks to a sparse cinematographic writing, eerie camera angles, a big attention brought to the sound (the film should have had a nomination for the Best Sound at the César Ceremony in 2004), a music which often has the form of a barely audible note scattered with disturbing musical effects, Siegfrid Alnoy conjures up a disquieting climate which takes the form of an increasing crescendo throughout the film. The murder sequence made me look away and I can say that I hadn't been impressed by a murder sequence for a long time. Actors aren't very known in the French mainstream and their somewhat blank acting help to maintain the malaise.

The title of the film comes from a French popular song that is sung when someone is about to drink a glass of alcohol for the very first time. Once she swallowed the beverage, her peers sing: "she's one of us. She drank her glass like the others!". This type of sequence is shown in the film when Christine is in a restaurant with her colleagues to celebrate her success at her driving test. Yes, "she's one of us" and "she's also part of an oppressive system that destroys her and transforms her in a normal monster". These are Siegfird Alnoy's words about her work. Its only fault is that the form has sometimes the tendency to forget the contents. But it doesn't stop you from watching an unnerving, compelling work that will haunt you for a long time.

Disturbing

[relfyh · 15 March 2004]

An unsettling film about a woman unable to fit into her surroundings, out of place at work, at home, with her parents. Shot in a very clinical manner - it should come as no surprise that the director admires Resnais and Antonioni. There is some humor in the film, though even that is undercut by some dialogue about wishing to laugh for once without it being at the expense of others. The film manages, however, to include some melodrama: a murder, a police investigation, an off-screen suicide.

I saw the film at a series of French films in New York and was inclined, despite everything, to give the director the benefit of the doubt on a film which, though unpleasant, seemed to have a great deal of sympathy for those who just don't fit in. Unfortunately, the director was present and explained that the film was above all a critique of the workplace, which saps the creativity of workers. Despite my upper middle-class status, I could only think at that point: Elitist bulls**t! For most people, work is the means by which they support and protect themselves and their families. And for many, the workplace is the locus of their creativity--or at least where they can draw on the support and friendship of their co-workers.

There were in this film no children, no books, no sign of the civil society that sustains people faced with earning a living, being decent, facing mortality. The film seemed to succumb, ultimately, to the fallacy of form: only something lifeless, dreary and unrelenting could describe the situation of the workplace. Convinced me more than ever of the formal validity of the work of leftist filmmakers like Loach, Leigh and Godard (at least the early Godard), who are able to depict the contradictions of modern life with vitality and humor and, ultimately, respect for those who have to endure it.

So, yes, a provocative film, but the work of a scold.

Not for everyone

[searchanddestroy-1 · 8/10 · 14 May 2022]

A rather strange but interesting study about solitude and difficulties for a woman to communicate, build relationship. It may be handicaped by an abrupt editing, typical of French films d'auteurs. It is not destined to the bulk of audiences. It is disturbing for too sensitive people. The faintness of urban life and diseases, psychological diseases it provokes, the inner collapse for weak minded persons, that's mainly what it is about. So please, don't be too harsh with this film.

Mostly boring

[mfsor · 4/10 · 22 May 2006]

Sasha Andres as Christine Blanc was very good, and there were surprising moments during the story, as when she pushed the other woman over at the pool, which was done very well. But the whole thing moved too slowly, and the dumb-and-dumber cops were a pathetic attempt at comic relief, and the chief inspector or whatever he was at the restaurant felt quite lame. The idea of the water running was clever, although not everyone figured that out. We watched it for the french, which is often difficult with the bad sound. The stupid DVD jacket said it was about the tedium of the modern office, but that had nothing to do with the story at all.

a complete waste of time

[rg125-1 · 1/10 · 13 June 2009]

This is director Siegrid Alnoy's first, and undoubtedly, last feature film. It is a desperate attempt to be philosophical about the modern human condition that is neither artistic nor insightful. It's just plain boring.

An unattractive, completely uninteresting, almost catatonic, thirty- something woman plods her way through a boring life until she freaks out and murders the only friend she has. Then, almost magically, some good things start happening to her -- until of course the ending.

If you're really interested in masterful presentations of alienated individuals, there are no better films than Antonioni's work in the 1960's. Don't waste your time on this amateurish, pointless, insipid trash.

This is the story of an uncompelling and not very believable psychopath.

[pspeakes · 2/10 · 26 November 2006]

She lives in a world where people have no instinctual sense of each other. Her world is reduced to simple geometry that has little resemblance to modern business, good or bad. The photography is very solid and gives the film what little gravity it achieves.

As a "temp" Sasha's environment is business. Yet, business, though supposedly everpresent, is nowhere to be seen, has no urgency, does not push people to extremes - It is not business as we know it. Folks have time for extended pointless conversations, and even drink wine in the office cafeteria.

Our Sasha works days in offices that typically have windows, with pleasant views. Not too bad. The director could have spent time in a windowless overnight office, month-in month-out to see how people adapt to the setting and each other. People survive for years in such places and are nowhere near as boring as the characters in this movie.

Instead, the offices she inhabits are in an idyllic French Alpine setting, she has a wonderful apartment, no traffic jams, and the hot water probably works - maybe her problem is that her life has no resistance. A big argument for New York over France?

I feel this filmmaker would make the same vacated empty film if they were in China, pre-80's Poland, a Juarez maquilladora, a Dickensian factory, or the first Ford plant. In short, they have no sense of the individuality of people and the social forms they create. They have no sense for what gets a worker through a horrible or great day, they have no sense for what diverts a worker for better or worse, no sense of the things that fill a worker's world. And which we would be interested in hearing about.