Whatever

A computer programmer in his thirties on a good salary. The work is dull, the flat is empty, and there is nobody in his life. The company sends him out to provincial cities to run training sessions with a colleague. The colleague is in worse shape than he is: a man who has never managed anything with anyone and whose anger has been growing for years. The longer the two of them circulate through hotel rooms and empty bars, the worse it gets. Philippe Harel adapted Michel Houellebecq's first novel of 1994 and plays the lead himself. The book's central claim is buried in its French title: that market competition now extends into sexual life. The film neither endorses nor refutes that; it shows how unreliable the narrator saying it is. A cold, flat, deeply uncomfortable adaptation.