(Camarades) "The first successful film to really deal with that third of a man's life spent at work" (New York Film Festival, 1970), Comrades resonates with the spirit of May '68 in being about the birth of a political intelligence in a working-class young man-a fictionalized version of what must have occurred to so many who fought on the barricades in that Paris spring and whose perceptions were forever changed. Yan (Jean-Paul Giquel), hoping to escape a dead-end future in the provinces, arrives in Paris sans degree, professional training and of course, money. All he has is a head full of dreams. While waiting for that office job that will usher him into the middle class and allow him to marry his girlfriend Juliet (Juliet Berto), disgruntledly working as a clerk at a chic boutique, Yan takes a production-line job. Back among the proletariat, he finds to his shock that he is only one of thousands of similar lads who dream of white collars while wearing the blues. Yan may be slow to learn where it's at, but his path to dignity directs him away from upward mobility and into the struggle at hand. Karmitz adopts a Brecht-Weillian style, interrupting the narrative with song, making Comrades a serious film about workers that also succeeds in being quite entertaining.