“The measure of a man is what he does with power,” Plato wrote. One who misuses power for personal gain, the quotation implies, is less of a man than one who uses it to benefit others. Integrity isn’t a staple in Lindon’s resume, which includes his vile bourgeois in Coline Serreau’s Chaos (2001) and his glowering anti-Semite in Benoît Jacquot’s Diary of a Chambermaid remake (2015). Yet his characters’ grappling with their consciences in Philippe Lioret’s Welcome (2009), Augustine, and Stéphane Brizé’s Madame Chambon (2009) and A Few Hours of Spring (2011), prioritizes the conflict between selfishness and selflessness—or at least fairness—that’s alien to criminals and ruthlessly ambitious men.

The Measure of a Man (2015), Lindon’s third consecutive film with Brizé, is a spare social realist drama about an illegally downsized factory machinist who, after months of supporting his family on a monthly benefit of 500 euros, gets a job, but must then decide if it is morally right to keep it. Lindon’s Thierry has been made haggard by his plight. In the first half of the film, he endures humiliating interview-training sessions and criticisms of his resumé and his uningratiating demeanor as a job-seeker. A bank manager icily refuses to give him a loan to pay for the care his developmentally disabled son will need in college, but urges him instead to cash in his nearly completed mortgage and buy a life insurance policy. Thierry’s refusal to substantially lower the price he and his wife had agreed upon with a couple for the sale of their seaside mobile home stems not from pigheadedness but residual pride.

Once hired as a big-box store detective—the job bringing him financial relief—Thierry is appalled to find that he not only has to use the store’s CCTV screens to spy on potential shoplifters but also on his fellow employees, since management is looking for trivial excuses to slash the work force. Frequently filmed from a 30-degree rear side angle by DP Eric Dumont, and in one two-shot as the alternating object of a flurry of rack focusing, Thierry is a circumspect observer of a series of interrogations targeting shoppers and workers alike. He speaks his “lines” to get the offenders to cooperate with growing embarrassment, and it becomes clear he is weighing up if his much-needed wage justifies his working for such a dehumanizing embodiment of the globalized economy, which heaps upon its impoverished victims the kinds of mortifications he suffered when unemployed. A master class in charged reticence, Lindon’s performance won him the best actor award at Cannes last year.

The Measure of a Man is self-evidently analogous to Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s Two Days, One Night (2014) and an oblique companion piece to Alain Cavalier’s Pater (2011). The issue of how to dispense power is central to Cavalier’s playful semiautobiographical meta-docufiction, which riffs on his and Lindon’s friendship as they meet—enjoying a plein air epicurean picnic with Cavalier’s chauffeur and an associate at one point—to discuss and investigate their roles in a mooted film. Cavalier has cast himself as the retiring French president who will instruct Lindon’s prime minister—whom he has hired away from the business he has run for 25 years as an egalitarian concern for its employees—to enforce the legalization of reduced income differentials on a national level. PM Lindon’s support of the proposed statute anticipates, on a macro scale, Thierry’s detestation of the obscene penny-pinching that costs The Measure of a Man’s big-box store employees their livelihoods—and one her life. The actor’s personal railing in an unguarded moment against “gobshites” who compromise—bringing him to “an unspeakable rage” and to the “verge of tears”—anticipates Thierry’s refusal to compromise over the sale of the beloved mobile home. Presumably unscripted, PM Lindon’s announcing he wants to review the French honor system further bespeaks the actor’s values. “I’m not comfortable with the Legion d’Honneur,” he says. In contrast, his desire to strip the award’s insignia, as well as health benefits, from recipients who move abroad smacks of nationalism. Lindon’s liberal fans will appreciate the disgust he registers in the film for the designer labels that pepper the stores of his Paris neighborhood; that he resents capitalists, dealers, and distributors who create addictions; that this wealthy industrialist’s son, who identifies with “the small fry,” lives in a flat in a five-story block that had only acquired an elevator shortly before the film was made. His one indulgence appears to be clothes—he and Cavalier film each other in Lindon’s extensive wardrobe when the director comes over to borrow a tie. Still, he throws nothing away: he proudly holds up one of his grandfather’s well-preserved shoes to the camera, extolling the beauty of a sole made of one piece of leather.

“I like him. He’s warm. A touch impulsive—I’ll rein him in,” Cavalier says of his costar as he secretly watches him making a phone call in the director’s garden. “He’s robust, frighteningly sympathetic. He’ll be popular.” He means Lindon would make a popular prime minister in the pretend movie, but he’s talking about the man.