Fitfully funny and mercifully short

Employee of the Month (M, 85 mins) Directed by Jerome Commandeur Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★1⁄2

The French civil service, apparently, is a bloated monstrosity from which it is almost impossible to get fired. I learned this at a screening of Employee of the Month (Irreductible).

Then again, I also learned that there is a tribe in Ecuador called the Cachao, who paint themselves with red stripes and practice cannibalism (there isn’t), that Swedes can’t cook and only listen to Abba (not entirely true) and that scientists in the Arctic are often required to obtain a semen sample from polar bears by, err, whatever means come to hand.

So, y’know, I’m taking most of what Jerome Commandeur’s new film had to teach me with a fat grain of salt.

Employee of the Month is a satirical farce, set in modern-day France and further afield, based around the fictional life of lowly office-jockey Vincent Peltier (played by Commandeur).

Influenced by a Svengali-like union leader, Vincent refuses all attempts to get him to take an offer of redundancy, knowing that he cannot be fired and has a job for life, if he simply refuses to leave.

But, with her own career on the line and a prestigious job in government awaiting her, Vincent’s boss devises a series of job offers that Vincent must accept, to not be in breach of contract.

And so Vincent is posted to the rural north, to a prison, to the Arctic – where he finds true love – and then to Sweden to try out the life of a responsible family man.

In the film’s most inspired moment, it is a real-life TV interview with Gerard Depardieu – used beautifully here – that inspires Vincent to return to France.

Employee of the Month is not much more than a sketch comedy of loosely linked scenes.

Some of it is very funny, and some of it only reminds us that a level of casual chauvinism that hasn’t been seen in much of the world’s cinema this century is still absolutely fine in France.

Employee Of The Month is a smash hit, in a country that still deifies Benny Hill. Go figure.

There are some clever moments here – and presumably plenty of gags that only someone who has lived in France would get.

Me, I laughed a few times, but I was also happy with that slender 85-minute run time.