The Human Resources Manager (M). Director: Eran Riklis. Starring: Mark Ivanir, Gila Almagor, Noah Silver, Guri Alfi, Bogdan E. Stanoevitch. 99 minutes
'Human resources' is a corporate-speak oxymoron, by which employees — each one a unique and inherently dignified human being — are objectified, and judged according to their usefulness to their employer. Human resources managers, ideally, will balance the needs of the company (a collective, money-making entity) with respect and reverence for individual employees' basic human dignity.
On the surface, the dull title The Human Resources Manager promises all the intrigue of a professional training video. But the implicit ethical dimension to the role of human resources managers bears deeper consideration, and indeed is one of the film's central tenets.
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The titular Human Resources Manager (Ivanir) is initially focused more on his company's public image than on human dignity. The company in question is an industrial bakery in Israel, and it is large enough that HRM's relationships with many of those who surround him have become largely depersonalised. The film emphasises this by pointedly not giving any of its characters actual names. Immersed in corporatism, HRM has lost touch with humanity.
HRM's response to a potential public relations disaster is certainly impersonal, despite the upsetting details. A pay slip from the bakery has shown up in the possession of an unidentified migrant woman who was killed in a much publicised terrorist bombing a week ago. A nosy journo, dubbed by HRM as The Weasel (Alfi), has noted the bakery management's apparent failure to notice their employee's absence, and is threatening to run a story about indifference and neglect. HRM slips straight into damage-control mode.
As it happens, the disturbing oversight is not HRM's or even management's fault. But media spin counts for a lot. In order to counteract the pending defamatory story, the bakery offers to transport the dead woman back to her family in Romania and to pay for the funeral. That's not all: it will also send a personal representative, in the form of the reluctant HRM. All involved are no doubt aware of the irony of combatting accusations of inumanity with a publicity stunt dressed as human outreach.
What follows is a tragi-comic road trip. HRM encounters the dead woman's cantankerous Ex-Husband (Stanoevitch) and feral street-kid son, The Boy (Silver), then embarks on an eventful cross-country journey towards the woman's remote home village. He is accompanied by The Weasel, The