11/09/2024 – In her first feature film, Laura Carreira casts a pessimistic eye on modern work through the story of a migrant woman who works as a warehouse worker
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Famed for his rallying cry, “We are the 99%!”, radical writer David Graeber also helped define the “bullshit job”, referring to work that’s arguably meaningless in today’s economy, triggering a negative connected impact on our self-worth. The lead character in Laura Career’s On Falling – which world-premiered in the Discovery strand of Toronto and is showing in the San Sebastian competition later this month – has an unquestionable profession like this, picking consumer goods off the shelves for shipping in an Amazon-like warehouse. But in choosing the gentle social-realist house style of its producer, Sixteen Films, you feel the forceful term “bullshit jobs” softened into “bothersome jobs”; just as Daniel Blake in Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake [+leggi anche:
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scheda film] spray-painted his job centre in protest, with dramatic sense earned, those tat-filled, sky-high shelves shouldn’t be standing at the end, given the anger reciprocated in the audience.
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Partially inspired by her experiences as a Portuguese film student resettling in Edinburgh, Carreira is aiming for a subdued tone and rhythm that mimic the pain of a horrible day’s work, but real-world details in her film could be more precisely rendered than they are – where in Scotland we are, for instance, even if we could make an educated guess at Glasgow – and we also might disagree on the story’s defeatism: Carreira neglects to consider that her character Aurora (Joana Santos) could develop more resilience and resourcefulness.
Yet the film still makes the apt point that work without fulfilment is no work at all. Aurora spends her morning and afternoon shifts, cut in two by a short lunch break where her colleagues struggle to muster any conversation, moving items one by one into her basket, with a digital tracker constantly monitoring her productivity and speed. She starts resembling the character WALL-E in the first act of the Pixar film, a comparison driven home by the automated notifications she gets commending her good daily stats, with the warehouse itself seeming like a cross between a dirty freight-truck interior and a coffin.
So, Carreira asks, is working like this worth it if it saps our life away, rather than replenishing it? Aurora sees an opportunity to pivot into more fulfilling social-care work, and then Carreira convincingly shows us that her protagonist’s empathy and selflessness can’t reach the surface when her social life, interpersonal skills and natural demeanour have been vanquished by wage slavery (to use the classical term describing alienated labour). There’s an obvious analogue to Loach’s Sorry We Missed You [+leggi anche:
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scheda film]showing menial work’s eventual overtaking by complete automation, but the veteran British director endeared us better to his central characters by simply telling us more about their backgrounds and being more transparent about their inner lives. Carreira makes a bold screenwriting choice to deny Aurora the agency other filmmakers might have granted her, but it leaves her feeling half-formed.
To generalise about social realism overall, a director working in this mode either has to convince us of something we’ve taken for granted or overlooked, or confirm our biases with painstaking attention to detail and a sharper argument than we could express ourselves. No audience member will lack sympathy for Aurora’s predicament, and few will be surprised by the iniquities of her particular job; On Falling is laudably a protest film clamouring for a better way of life, but it still evokes a story’s first act mistaken for a whole feature, absent the catharsis that would have us raising our fists, rather than just nodding along.
On Falling is a co-production of the UK and Portugal, staged by Sixteen Films and BRO Cinema. Its international sales are handled by Goodfellas.
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