Board meetings, memos, referenda, mechanical-parts assembly, and union negotiations generally aren't the stuff of scintillating melodrama, tied as they are to the workaday world of repetitive labor and middle-management bureaucracy. The second entry in Shooting Gallery's fall series—a program that has amassed such recent gems as Croupier, Adrenaline Drive, and Titanic Town—Laurent Cantet's Human Resources is about all these things, yet it's riveting for the simple reason that people invest a lot of themselves in their jobs. Cantet revels in the monotony of punch-clock drones and heartless suits in an anonymous French factory, but he also understands how much is at stake in their daily rituals. The trim, fresh-faced Jalil Lespert stars as the intensely conflicted hero, a young business-school graduate hired as an executive-in-training at the same factory where his blue-collar father, the sad-eyed Jean-Claude Vallod, has worked for 30 years. Full of energy and innovative ideas but fatally naïve, Lespert's loyalties are precariously split between the unionized assembly-line operators and his white-collar bosses When both sides divide sharply over the mandated 35-hour workweek, he attempts to gauge the workers' feelings through a questionnaire, but winds up having the results turned against them. Using spare production sound and documentary-like camerawork, Cantet presents an authentic, fly-on-the-wall portrait of the divisions between the offices and the factory floor, and how they're exploited to management's advantage. Though sometimes too didactic in championing the working class—Cantet suggests that all bosses are amoral, Machiavellian monsters by nature—Human Resources is a mostly searing indictment of the common workplace. At the heart of the film, Lespert's complex relationship with his father accumulates subtle shadings and ironies. Gradually, it becomes apparent that the years of hard sacrifice Vallod endured to give his son a more prosperous future have only alienated them from each other. Compassionate yet fiercely unsentimental, Human Resources asserts that labor wars are as likely to take place in the family room as they are on the picket line.