This film is a real sleeper, highly praised by Roger Ebert and A.O. Scott of The New York Times. Human Resources begins innocently enough as the story of an eager beaver fresh out of business school who returns from Paris to his home in the provinces to take a white-collar job at the factory where his father has worked for 30 years. The film follows Frank during his first weeks on the job, gradually revealing itself as an angry and unforgiving look at the way factories can treat employees as machines, and sometimes scrap them. More class conscious than an American film would be, it shows the son torn between tempting management opportunities and his sense of fairness. He begins to realize that human resources is not a benevolent term, but belongs on the same list with raw materials resources.
Humans are simply an element in a production flow chart.
Human Resources is a valuable, heartbreaking film about the way those resources are plugged into a system, drained of their usefulness, and then discarded. This riotous comedy follows the illegal misadventures of an ex-con dishwasher and his wife, a manicurist who dreams of becoming rich by way of a bank robbery in New York City. Opening a cookie store as a front for their operation, they suddenly find themselves heading a monolithic cookie empire and trying to cope with their newly found wealth. Chen Kaige renders the turbulent history of ancient China with the same fusion of epic sweep and intense drama that he applied to the Cultural Revolution in Farewell, My Concubine. The story centers on Ying Zheng, who in the third century B.C., conquered a series of warring kingdoms to become the first emperor of China.