In the previous chapter, I looked at the positive construction of neoliberal subjectivity in the films of Audiard with their stories of triumphant underdog entrepreneurialism in a context of competition and precarity. In this chapter, I will consider how films frame the crisis of the entrepreneurial subject in the grip of debt. With the rise in the power of financial capital under neoliberalism, Maurizio Lazzarato suggests, the creditor-debtor relationship has replaced the capital-labour dynamic at the centre of social, economic and political life. The relationship has always been a profoundly asymmetrical one, with power concentrated in the hands of the lender rather than those in debt. The imbalance has nonetheless become particularly stark since the recent crisis and the austerity that came in its wake. This is why, for Lazzarato, the crisis is not only social, political or economic but is a crisis of neoliberal subjectivity. As he explains, ‘the project of replacing the Fordist worker with the entrepreneur of the self, of transforming the individual into an individual enterprise that manages skills as economic resources to be capitalized, has collapsed in the subprime crisis’ (Lazzarato 2015: 14). The dominant figure of the current moment is not the entrepreneurial self: it is the indebted man or woman.

To approach this figure, I will initially look at three important works, Le Silence de Lorna (Lorna’s Silence, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2008), L’Emploi du temps (Time Out, Cantet, 2001) and Le Père de mes enfants (Father of My Children, Hansen-Løve, 2009). I will tease out their debt-related dynamics, before placing them in dialogue with two theorists, the already mentioned Lazzarato, a key voice on debt, and Lauren Berlant, whose Cruel Optimism, especially its discussion of the ‘impasse’, provides vital tools to engage with the affective, embodied and temporal dimensions of debt narratives. I will then move on to a cluster of films from 2011 that could clearly be labelled ‘crisis films’ in that they engage explicitly with either the impact of debt on individual lives or the behaviour of institutions (banks, courts) in relation to debt. These are: De bon matin (Early One Morning, Moutout, 2011), Toutes nos envies (All Our Desires, Lioret, 2011), Une vie meilleure (A Better Life, Kahn, 2011) and Louise Wimmer (Mennegun, 2011), the first three being star vehicles, the fourth, definitely not.