Yes Men refont le monde

I went to the Rue General Dufour to attend the film screening, which was down in a charming basement performance space with comfortable seats and a nice big screen. And then I saw Yes Men Rule the World (as it was titled online; the French title was Yes Men refont le monde, which means ‘Yes Men fix the world’, which would make considerably more sense). While I once again had to try to brush off my rusty and, let’s face it, incompetent French because while all the filmed scenes were in English with French subtitles, the voice-overs were in French. Luckily it was all contextualised and fairly simple, so wasn’t hard to understand at all, although I did have difficulty trying to listen in French while reading an English headline on the screen.

The film itself was a funny, silly documentary about two anti-corporate protestors who bring their issues to the fore with some remarkably high-profile hoaxes. Their series of attacks focused on corporations who profit from the suffering of others, and caused considerable embarrassment. Documented on film, though, their different stunts were very hit-and-miss. After the impressive gall, coordination and research that had to go into severely embarrassing Dow by appearing on BBC World News with a potential audience of three million and posing as a spokesman claiming the company would accept full responsibility for the industrial disaster in India that happened under the operation of a company Dow bought out. Stock prices plummeted, headlines were made and the company had to quickly assure shareholders that no payout would be made. After that, silly little pranks like the sub-Swiftian joke of making people light candles purportedly made of recycled human being, or interviewing idiot corporate advisors who say things like ‘Carbon emissions are good because they’re what trees breathe: they call it pollution – we call it LIFE’ and then twisting their word so that it sounds like they want gay erotica behind them cannot come close to comparing. A final stunt in which the Yes Men posed as representatives for a housing company screwing people in New Orleans out of their old homes and pledged to let them back in and help pay for regeneration came close, and came coupled with satisfying interviews in which the usual attack against the Yes Men – that these stunts are cruel to the victims because they raise false hopes – was repudiated by the victims themselves, who were very happy for the attention given to the issues.