À pied d'œuvre / At Work

Valérie Donzelli: À pied d'œuvre / At Work (FR 2026). Bastien Bouillon as the writer-handyman-family father Paul Marquet.

FR 2026 © 2025 Pitchipoï Productions, France 2 Cinéma. Production : Alain Goldman.

    Fiche technique

Réalisation : Valérie Donzelli

Scénario : Valérie Donzelli et Gilles Marchand, d'après le roman éponyme (2023) de Franck Courtès

Photographie : Irina Lubtchansky – format : couleur — 1,66:1

Décors : Manu de Chauvigny

Costumes : Nathalie Raoul

Musique : Jean-Michel Bernard

Son : Emmanuel Croset, Simon Poupard et André Rigaut

Montage : Pauline Gaillard

    Distribution

Bastien Bouillon : Paul Marquet

Virginie Ledoyen : Alice, éditrice chez Gallimard

André Marcon : le père de Paul

Valérie Donzelli : l'ex-épouse de Paul

Marie Rivière : Christine

Adrien Barazzone : Pierre Lautrec

Marion Lécrivain : la sœur de Paul

Oscar Tillette : le fils de Paul

Ève Oron : la fille de Paul

Philippe Katerine : le bijoutier

Claude Perron : la femme à la valise

Béatrice de Staël : la marchande de presse

Pauline Serieys : la jeune femme de la mezzanine

Michel Gondry : le client aux chaussettes

Éric Reinhardt : le client maniaque

Christopher Thompson : l'homme aux buis

    Soundtrack: Franz Schubert: Trio in Es-Dur für Klavier, Violine und Violoncello nr. 2, D 929 (op. 100) (1827), perf. Trio Thaleia (Thomas Haug, Thomas Bruder, Wolfgang Hess)

    Dedication : À mon père / To My Father

    Loc : Paris, Montmorency

    Langue originale : français

    Durée : 92 minutes

    Genre : biographie, drame

    Sociétés de distribution : Diaphana (France) ; Agora Films (Suisse romande), Lumière (Belgique)

    Dates de sortie :

Italie : 29 août 2025 (Mostra de Venise) - Winner: Golden Osella: Best Screenplay - Winner: Premio Fondazione Fai Persona Lavoro Ambiente Award - Special Mention: Treatment of Issues Related to Work 

Belgique, France, Suisse romande : 4 février 2026

    Vu samedi, le 7 février 2026, Majestic Bastille, 4 bd Richard-Lenoir, 75011 Paris, M° Bastille, Lignes 1, 5, 8

Venice Film Festival 2025: Synopsis

" “Finishing a text doesn’t mean being published, being published doesn’t mean being read, being read doesn’t mean being loved, being loved doesn’t mean being successful, and success offers no promise of fortune.”

"À pied d’œuvre tells the true story of a successful photographer who gives up everything to devote himself to writing — and discovers poverty. This radical account, blending clarity and self-deprecation, portrays the journey of a man willing to pay the ultimate price for his freedom. "

Director’s Statement

" À pied d’œuvre is the portrait of a man who leaves behind a comfortable life to devote himself to writing, eventually slipping into precarity. This radical and deeply personal choice moved me profoundly. I wanted to stay true to the honesty of his journey, its simplicity and discipline. Together with Gilles Marchand, we wrote a character who is upright, gentle, and determined. Bastien Bouillon quickly emerged as the obvious choice, with his quiet strength and understated presence. This film questions the value we place on a life driven by a silent, unspectacular, yet unstoppable passion: the need to create, no matter what. " (Venice Film Festival 2025)

AA: Valérie Donzelli's À pied d'œuvre / At Work is a vision of contemporary life based on the acclaimed eponymous autobiographical novel by Franck Courtès. 

The protagonist Paul Marquet (Bastien Bouillon) is a decent and talented man fighting for survival in a twin trap. He is a top photographer who has switched to writing because that is his calling. He is a great writer, too, but you cannot earn a living as a writer today. Which is why he enters the gig economy.

Paul writes in the morning, and the rest of the day he is a handyman (un homme à tout faire, un factotum, un Michel Morin, un bricoleur, a jack of all trades) in the world of the precariat and petits boulots (odd jobs). 

Paul is a construction worker who helps demolish buildings. He is a gardener. He is a plumber. He is a carpenter. Helping take apart a steel ladder from a bunk bed he is hurt and prescribed a month of sick leave which he cannot afford. He is a taxi driver whom his friends and relatives are embarrassed and shocked to meet like this. He is a window washer. He changes balcony plantings. When he hits a roe deer (chevreuil) with his car, he empathizes with its suffering and butchers it for dinner.

Like Ken Loach's Sorry We Missed You, À pied d'œuvre is a fascinating and essential study of self-employment. We witness the functioning of the Jobbin website where the job seeker can enter his offer. The lower you go, the better the chance, and you see your status improve on a sliding scale. On the other side, there is an online review feature. Your performance will be instantly scored for all to see.

As a writer, Paul keeps being rejected by his editor (Virginie Ledoyen) at Gallimard because his stuff is too autobiographical. In a desperate turn, the hard drive of Paul's computer gets irrevocably broken, and he needs to start again from hand-written notebooks. The book (on which the movie is based) is finally published and favourably received, but the financial reward is far from enough to secure a living as a full time writer.

Thus despite the success, Paul keeps multi-tasking in his triple life – besides a writer and a handyman he is also a devoted father of three children, although he has been evicted from home by his ex-wife (played by the director herself). Mostly Paul is a remote father, in touch with his offspring via teleconferences, but still in warm terms. His own father condemns him for being a clochard, which he is not, but he allows Paul to live in his unheated cellar, a former maid's room.

Anton Chekhov's My Life (Моя жизнь, 1896) is a work which resembles À pied d'œuvre in important ways, especially the inside view in the account of social descent. But the important difference is Paul's triple life. Chekhov's Misail (yes) has only a single life, of which he is proud, while all others find it a disgrace.

Because of the cellar symbolism of social downfall I was reminded of Bong Joon-Ho's Parasite (2019) and F. M. Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground (Записки изъ подполья, 1864), for Edwin Frank in Stranger Than Fiction the point of origin to what he calls the "Twenthieth-Century Novel". Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver is another point of affinity, both with Dostoevsky and Bresson. But in À pied d'œuvre the downfall is only external, and it is not a study in alienation in any way. While losing his social status and the superficial paraphernalia of what Pierre Bourdieu called la distinction, Paul actually comes closer to life and his inner self. His is a journey of discovery in the world of today and himself, inseparably.

Neither is Valérie Donzelli's movie a Bressonian study of spiritual illumination and transcendence in asceticism, although there are points in common in dignity, self-sacrifice and inner growth. 

From the beginning, Donzelli displays a warm and engrossing commitment in her unusual tale. The cast is great, and her regular actor Bastien Bouillon excels in the leading role with silent determination. There is something Keatonian in his unsmiling yet appealing habitus.

The cinematography by Irina Lubtchansky impresses with precise observation, sharp mise-en-scène and a subtly warm colour palette. I like the attention paid to fine soft detail. À pied d'œuvre is an adventure in the world of today, and the documentary appetite of Donzelli and Lubtchansky never fails to excite.

A backstory goes unmentioned in À pied d'œuvre. Since the breakthrough of the internet 30 years ago, the cultural sector and the media world have suffered a devastating blow. Photographers lost their income when everybody became a photographer with their smartphones. The supremacy of the internet destroyed most of the media, including literature, as people perceive that everything is instantly available for free or very cheap access online. The internet behemoths of Silicon Valley are the winners who take all, and the creative professionals get crumbles. 

À pied d'œuvre is a saga of the creative professional in the age of the internet.

The audience was visibly impressed. We were nodding at each other in astonishment of how good the film was. À pied d'œuvre is a film I look forward to revisiting, and I would find more films like this welcome.