At Work review photographer ditches career for gig economy and writing in poverty drama

"With a kind of unvarying bland placidity, Bastien Bouillon plays someone who (like Courtes) abandoned a very successful career in photography in pursuit of his financially perilous dream of being a serious writer. We get a single shot early on of all his cameras on a shelf: he presumably does not sell any to alleviate his financial difficulties but we never see or hear about these valuable objects ever again."

"So he is forced to move to a cheaper place and do piecemeal labour to pay the bills while he works listlessly on his magnum opus; he deliberately chooses menial, meaningless work to ringfence the dignity of his new vocation as a serious author. He never quite answers the question of why he doesn't just do literary-adjacent work such as teaching. Perhaps his pride will not permit him."

"So using a Taskrabbit-type website on which workers must humiliatingly undercut each other in bidding to do various manual-labour jobs for low fees, he scrapes a depressing living. But with an awful inevitability, he turns out to be writing a heartwarming book about what this existence is like, with vignettes of all these micro-employers, which is naturally entitled At Work."

The film follows a former successful photographer who abandons photography to pursue a precarious literary career. He receives modest critical praise but low sales, loses family stability, and faces publisher refusal to advance funds. He takes menial gig-economy jobs through a Taskrabbit-style site, deliberately selecting undignified work to protect his writerly dignity while scraping a depressed living. The protagonist's emotional flatness and implausible choices, such as never selling cameras or seeking literary-adjacent employment, undermine the realism. The narrative culminates in an almost inevitable autobiographical book composed of vignettes drawn from his gig clients, titled At Work.

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