When the film starts, we find Sébastien Morin (Baptiste Lecaplain) lying in bed, staring at the ceiling of his bed room reflecting, thinking and confessing or having an interior monologue about how he never felt the urge to work and thought that it was perfectly OK not to start work for as long as possible and in fact quite enjoys having nothing to do except to read, to think and to spend his time sitting at the neighborhood park and from time to time, dancing. He had been doing that for 10 years since he got his Baccalaureat, the French equivalent of our high school certificate of education and has amassed a BA, an MA and then a Ph D in all kinds of liberal arts subjects, including literature and philosophy. He was given a nudge by his parents to start looking seriously at what he wanted to do in life. As a result, he moved out of his parents' house and started being "independent", surviving on social security allowances and in the process started sharing a room with another guy Bruno (Félix Moati) in similar situation in the house of Anna (Charlotte le Bon) who was working as an editor for a publisher for children and porn books.
When he tried to apply for welfare the first time, he was kicked out. Then Bruno taught him all the tricks he needed to be a recipient. He did as he was told has been on welfare since but did work on a couple of odd jobs from time to time, including being a hearse driver, a TV monitor whilst Bruno became a museum attendant or Santa Claus etc. But Sébastian never found any work that appealed to him until he became a top notch bed salesman, where he met accidentally a girl which really took his fancy, Jeannine (Vanessa Guide) whom he saw on TV as a girl who wanted France to change and whose speech really inspired him, a girl who got him so excited that he masturbated in front of the TV screen when by accident, his boss came in and found him jerking off in front of some "pandas", which had by then replaced the image of his heroine on the TV screen. He was fired without further ado.
But the film also develops another theme: the triangular relationship between Bruno, who had a crush on Anna, who in turn had a crush on Jeannine (Vanessa Guide, who did not reciprocate. Bruno tried all kinds of tricks to draw Anna's attention, including doing whatever he learned Anna like from their chit chat like people wearing leather pants, people who shaved their legs but all to no avail. Anna was patient with Sébastien but finally gave up because he did nothing when she expected all other men would have made a move despite with all the subtle and even explicit "hints" she gave him and kicked him out when she decided on a new boyfriend. At the end of the film, we find Sébastien happily married to his dream girl Jeannine, with a small child. As if by fate, he met Jeannine when Jeannine went into his department store to buy a bed and they felt an instinctive rapport with each other. She has an agreement with Jeannine: she would work to support the family whilst he would be the "house-husband " and look after their child.
When the film starts, we find the head of Sébastien walking from screen right to screen left against a whole rectangle of heads of working people getting out from the metro in the morning, all dressed in black, almost identically and hurrying in one direction. But when the film ends, we find Sébastien, Jeannine and their kid in a pram walking against a similar rectangle of anonymous heads in black. There is a slight difference: after they are done, the whole crowd suddenly reverse the direction of their hurried walk. Is Guedj trying to tell us something there?
Should we or should we not work? If we should, what is latest age by which we should start? If we've decided to work, under what conditions should we work? Must our work always be ones we take pleasure in doing? Should it always be the case that the man should work whilst his wife stays at home to take care of domestic duties? Should one follow the social norm or strike out on a path of his own in seeking his own happiness? What is the limit of the right of an individual to do what pleases him? Should we opt for what Eric Fromm calls a "having" mode of existence as against a "being" mode of existence? These are some of the questions which remain in our minds as the credits rise up on the silver screen one after another at the end of the film and for some, perhaps long after that. Whatever the answers to our questions may be, we have certainly been shown one possible view of how to look at those problems: Sebastien's life seems completely devoid of stress but is Anna right when in a long suppressed outburst before throwing him out of her house, she finally accuses him of just being afraid of making mistakes by committing himself to a particular way of a rather boring "conventional " life as every one is doing. Is choosing not to choose itself also a choice?
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