We made it! Here we are at the end of our first portion of the A-to-Z challenge. Before we talk about what’s coming up next, let’s get right to it this week. For the letter “Z” we’re going to look at Zero Fucks Given (2021).
Title: Zero Fucks Given
Director: Julie Lecoustre and Emmanuel Marre
Released: July 11, 2021
Runtime: 1 hour 55 minutes
Available to stream on: Prime Video and Mubi
IMDb synopsis: A young flight attendant loses her job at a low-cost airline.
Cassandre (Adèle Exarchopoulos) is in her mid-twenties working as a flight attendant for the budget airline Wing. Does she love her job? No, not in the slightest. In fact, it’s a soul crushing job that makes Cassandre numb to the world around her. So why stick with it? Because the end goal is to get to work for an elite airline such as Emirates.
Getting to that next level is no easy task. She has sales goals to meet on each flight, customer service scores to meet, all while dealing with the clientele that come with a budget airline such as Wing.
Cassandre does her best though. Each city, meal eaten, random hookup, they all blur together. Every interaction doesn’t really carry any depth to it. It’s all surface level, doing and saying whatever is necessary to hit her customer service and sales goals.
On top of the soul crushing experience of her job on a daily basis, we learn early on that Cassandre has lost her mother in a car accident. Instead of dealing with the situation, she’s used her job with Wing, as much as it kills her on the inside, to escape from her realities.
With a drive to not face her own reality that is just as strong as her desire to work for Emirates, Cassandre is surely bound for greatness. But will her thankless job cause her to break? Can she leave the issues of her past unresolved and still achieve her dream?
Yes, the story of Zero Fucks Given (2021) is interesting despite appearing very thin on paper. But what makes the movie compelling and keeps you invested in what happens with Cassandre is the performance we’re given from Adèle Exarchopoulos.
If you’ve ever worked in any customer-facing customer service role, you can see and feel the pain on Cassandre’s face. You can relate to the experience of going through every shift feeling like you’re dead inside and in zombie mode as you wander through life. Hiding the pain and anger of every human interaction behind a forced smile and a compliment.
So, in case you couldn’t tell, Adèle’s performance alone is reason enough for me to recommend you give this at least one viewing. Zero Fucks Given (2021) is a movie that might not sound like much, but it is definitely one that you appreciate more and more long after the credits have rolled.
Well, what did you think of Zero Fucks Given (2021)? If you’ve seen it and want to share your thoughts on it, tell me all about it in the comments below or by reaching out on social media!
Now that we’ve reached the end of the alphabet, what comes next? We’re starting over again! But this time, we’re going alphabetically by crew member name. Do you have a favorite visual effects artist? Set decorator? Editor? Whatever their role is, as long as it’s not actor or director, we’re going by first name starting with “A”, randomly choosing one film they’ve worked on to cover for the week, then moving on to “B”, so on and so on, working our way through the alphabet again.
Get those first suggestions in by Wednesday afternoon. Wednesday evening on Twitter and Instagram I’ll post the movie and crew member being covered for the letter “A”.