Cash / Gold Brick (Netflix, 2023)
‘If you live in Chartres, you have to hustle to get to the top.’ That’s the basic idea behind the French crime comedy Cash (which is called Gold Brick in some other territories).
The movie tells the story of Daniel Sauveur (Raphaël Quenard), who was born in Chartres, in the middle of Nowhere, France.
The town is run by the Breuil family, who export Parisian perfumes to the rest of the world.
They make all the money, while the workers hardly get by. After one of his own initiatives is thwarted, Daniel is fed up, he isn’t going to take it anymore. So he gathers a team around him and devises a plan to skim a little bit of the perfume time and time again, because ‘the system won’t notice if 50.000 bottles go missing.’
After the team, which includes Daniels best friend Scania (Igor Gotesman) and love interest Virginie (Agathe Rousselle), makes its first million, everything seems to go smoothly, but it wouldn’t be much of a movie if it all was plain sailing.
So when the shit hits the fan, Daniel has to wake up and smell the perfume, because in the end it’s not about the money but about the ‘panache’ you need to get out of a sticky situation.
Written and directed by Jérémie Rozan, this is a fun and relatively lighthearted enterprise. Of course it is wrong to steal, but when you live in a time of great inequality, it may seem like the only way out.
The movie begins as a straightforward attack on late stage capitalism, with the perfume warehouse looking like it was modelled on a company like Amazon, where a lot of people work in low-paid jobs without the prospect of a better future.
Along the way, however, Rozan is smart enough to show that getting rich tends to change people, and not always for the better. And that sometimes rich people want to change their situation too.
In the end the fast-paced, snappily edited and very well acted and directed Cash is, like a lot of movies, about wish fulfillment, a couple of hours of escapism to dream about a better life.
As such it definitely serves its purpose.
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