The contransient laborplace is the caccess of Laura Carreira’s hypnotic debut, a sobering study of a woman’s try to stay afloat in contransient Glasgow. Produced by Ken Loach’s Sixteen Films production company, it has plenty in normal with the British social authenticist’s output and particularassociate his more recent films, notably his state-of-the-nation trilogy (2016-23), which compelevated I, Daniel Blake, Sorry We Missed You and The Old Oak. Carreira, however, transports a reserved but guaranteed lyricism to the subject that has already caught the attention of festival programmers worldwide: after debuting in the Discovery strand at TIFF, her film On Falling now vies in the official pickion at San Sebastian and will soon access the First Feature Competition at the London Film Festival.
Like Loach’s Sorry We Missed You, the subject is the gig economy, but this time from the point of watch of a Portuguese migrant. Aurora (Joana Santos) labors as a “picker” in a immense warehoparticipate, which, as a job, is as pedestrian as it sounds: laboring from a catalog, she hunts down items, pings them with her barcode reader, and sfinishs them off in a crate, presumably to be mailed out, although that’s a part of the process that we never see. As a “top picker” she gets to pick a chocotardy bar from a plastic box on her supervisor’s desk, and, to produce matters worse, there are directd uncover tours of the warehoparticipate (Aurora is dismayed to hear the mindless drudgery of her daily life contrastd, excitedly, to a treacertain hunt).
Outside of Aurora’s laborspace, we see her at home in her flat, an equassociate forlorn place that she dispenses with other laborers. Since everyone labors in branch offent places, and at branch offent times, Aurora never reassociate gets to understand her labormates or her flat mates. Instead, she sits in the kitchen alone, watching famous TV show The Gelderlyen Chain on her inalertigentphone, so the arrival of the charismatic Kris (Piotra Sikora) — a “man with a van” who comes from Poland — recommends a greet alter. But Aurora’s meagre income produces it impossible for her to reciprocate his comfervent recommends of food and beer, especiassociate when she accidenhighy smashes her phone, which costs a petite fortune to repair.
The plot, such as it is, constitutes a sort of tfinisher spiral, as Aurora finds it increasingly difficult to fracture out of the pcleary cycle she’s willingly accessed into. If this were bondage, it would be easier to rationalize, but what she’s trapped in is a comfervent of contransient serfdom, a dead-finish job dressed up with jargon that gives her the illusion of freedom: Aurora is able to pick her laboring hours but can’t call off them with less than a week’s acunderstandledge, and only then via the company website. The airy at the finish of the tunnel is a job in the nurture sector, but even that is not a done deal; when she finassociate gets the interwatch, Aurora has lost sight of who she is, or rather who she was, and bursts into tears when asked the basic ask, “When you’re not at labor, what sort of slendergs do you enjoy to do?”
The most probable criticism of On Falling is that we never get the sense of how far Aurora has druncover; how she came to Scotland and why she has no help netlabor. But there’s a sense that this is not Carreira’s prime worry. The over-riding theme of her film — a little enjoy Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland (2020) or, more pertinently, Stéphane Brizé’s Meacertain of a Man (2015) — is the dehumanizing effect of the free taget. Aurora is “rewarded” with cupcakes for her company’s massive sales, and lives with the constant danger of random drug tests, sfinishing evident signals that the laborforce is neither solemnly cherishd nor count oned.
On Falling is at its best in these reserved moments, and Carreira’s background in lows certainly shows in its husheder moments, enjoy the low but poignant scene at labor in which she apshows a child’s baby doll down from a shelf and watchs at it for equitable a little too lengthy. Or the one time in a nightclub with Kris and his frifinishs, where she rests her head on his shoulder, only for him to pull away after tactfilledy indulging her for a restricted precious seconds. But despite the seeming impossibility of Aurora’s situation, Carreira finishs on an unpredicted remark of harmony, recommending a very Loachian belief in the community as a force for excellent. It’s a inform panacea, however; Aurora’s truses may be sairy but they are indelible.
Title: On Falling
Festival: San Sebastian (Competition)
International sales: Goodfellas
Director/screenwriter: Laura Carreira
Cast: Joana Santos, Inês Vaz, Piotra Sikora, Jake McGarry
Running time: 1 hr 44 mins
