Emmanuel Marre and Julie Lecoustre's Rien à foutre | Zero Fucks Given (2021)

Emmanuel Marre and Julie Lecoustre's Rien à foutre is a masterpiece, and Adèle Exarchopoulos plays the role of Cassandre brilliantly. For once, we see an airline company – and a low budget airline company probably modelled on Ryanair – from the point of view of a crew member. And not only do we see her at work in the plane – selling goods to the 'guests', caring for distressed ones, tolerating insulting ones, and tidying up swiftly before the next batch arrives – but we see her being trained, trained not only in first aid but trained to sell as much as possible, trained to smile constantly and never to express any negative feelings, trained to be a robot in a cut-throat capitalist environment.

Cassandre left her father and younger sister a few years before, unable to process the sudden death of her mother in a car crash. The numbness of her mindless work routine seemed to fit, coupled with the endless sexual encounters on Tinder, the clubs, the drugs, the drink, which could happen anywhere and everywhere the flight takes her. Her cellphone becomes an extension of her self. So glued to habit is she that she sees the compulsory training upwards to be a cabin manager as an existential threat.

But there are moments when the ice breaks, when emotion breaks through the deadness, such as when she almost begs her one-night-stand to lie with her a little longer. But the killer is when she comforts a patient going for an operation by buying her a wine on Cassandre's own credit card: that's a serious breach of company rules, and her compassionate action leaves her grounded for a time, in which she returns to her family and a return to the past, to the roundabout where her mother died.

The final scene is superb, as it's in Dubai – an artificial place with buildings specifically for (preferably rich) tourists in search of the wow factor. Dubai is a capital of capitalism, and people who come there come to take photos in droves, just to prove they've been there, to take selfies for distribution throughout the social media. And Cassandre? She doesn't give a fuck, does she?