Cassandre Wassels (Adèle Exarchopoulos) is a flight attendant on a budget airline called Wings, and is as professional as she needs to be, polite to the passengers, selling them as much of the duty free produce as she can as per her bosses' wishes, and appreciating she gets to see a lot of the world's most attractive locations. And their airports. Maybe this is not the most fulfilling of lives for a twentysomething woman, but she is simply content to have a job that will pay her bills and give her the opportunity to dance and drink in nightclubs and go back to her place for some casual sex with a willing man if the mood takes her. But Cassandre has issues she is not facing up to - what happened to her mother, for instance.
This glacial drama offered a real showcase for Exarchopoulos, who is in every scene and often holding the attention in the middle of the frame for many of those scenes, the directors showing their confidence in her charisma even when the character came across as something of a blank. But there's a reason for that, she is not allowing anyone to affect her too much, certainly there is the occasional moment when she lets her guard down, but largely she treats everyone as she does at work, polite, but with a certain reserve. Did this indicate she gave the zero fucks of the title, which made her sound callous and unfeeling? It was a slight misnomer, as while she does not give in to emotion, that does not mean they are not present.
What it actually means, after you spend some time with her, is that in this twenty-first century world you simply cannot afford to care too much, because existence is so uncertain. The big problem Cassandre has to confront is the death of her mother in a car crash (her mother was speeding - not by much, but enough to place legal blame on her for the accident), because it sees her trying to connect with her father (Alexandre Perrier) and sister (Mara Taquin), or rather, them trying to connect with her. Yet if her working life has influenced her at all, it's to tell her not to take them for granted, because as her mother's absence has illustrated, you never know when they may be gone. Not that this makes her more keen on making connections, if anything it makes her far more reluctant to give into these things you Earthlings call feelings.
But the corporate world, it is implied, is affecting everyone, and not in a good way. As Cassandre is told she will lose her job unless she tries for a promotion to team leader, when she goes on the course to graduate her results are pretty awful: she cannot pass as a genuine human being, because the corporate world has so many rules and so much artificiality that it stifles anything not only spontaneous, but warm and affectionate as well. Everything has been commodified, the politeness, the health and safety to save someone's life, the self-esteem that a bottle of perfume can bring, the fun when you're on holiday, it is so controlled and so focused on bringing in the profit that it can only create automatons like Cassandre. When she temporarily loses her attendant job, she goes back home and under her family's influence she begins to thaw, to open up a bit more, but by the end the pressure of big business is sapping that out of her again. The final scene of a soulless, stage-managed spectacle for bored tourists is very telling, and sums up a bleak future for our unintentionally icy heroine.
