The human cost of the online convenience shopping revolution is, arguably, still to be properly addressed in cinema or any other art form. Chloé Zhao’s 2020 Oscar winner Nomadland was, rightly or wrongly, criticised in some quarters for going easy on working conditions in the Amazon warehouse where she was allowed to film. This outstanding debut feature from the Scotland-based Portuguese film-maker Laura Carreira returns us to the subject, reminding us that the business of choosing items in the gigantic and ironically named “fulfilment centre” is not done by robots, but stressed human beings with the Steinbeckian job description of “pickers”, rushing along vast warehouse shelves, their work rate ruthlessly assessed by digital handsets. (It reminded me of the excellent Sorry We Missed You by Ken Loach, whose production company Sixteen Films has also brought out this film.)
It does not look as if Carreira has shot in a real warehouse, but the film looks convincing enough as her camera keeps very tight into the workers and their field of vision as they roam retail warehouse corridors. Portuguese screen star Joana Santos gives a quietly excellent performance as Aurora, an exploited worker in a fulfilment centre in Scotland. She gets a lift to and from work with a Portuguese colleague who has to gently remind her to contribute to the petrol. She works very hard, and is rewarded with a humiliating and demeaning little prize: a chocolate bar which the manager beamingly tells her to choose from a box on his desk.
But Aurora is on the edge. There is evidence that this job is strip mining the workers’ humanity and sanity. They are falling. Aurora experiences catastrophe when her phone breaks and she has to pay £99 to get it fixed. She has no money and is always hungry, which takes an insidious toll on her identity and behaviour; she also has a poignantly unrequited crush on a Polish guy called Kris (Piotr Sikora) in her shared house whose rent she cannot really pay. And when Aurora finally gets out of this retail workhouse prison to go for a job interview as a care worker, Carreira shows us how Aurora rewards herself with treats: cakes from a patisserie, a makeover, all the things that a human being might want to indulge in. But when her interviewer asks her an innocuous question about what she likes doing – the experience of simply inspecting her own life brings her to a crisis.
On Falling shows us a world of sadness and exhaustion, a kind of heavy cloud cover of depression that is both a symptom of the job and a way of getting through it: only by reducing yourself to zombie-like inattention to your own needs can you get through the day as a “picker”. Carreira and Santos show that Aurora’s undemonstrative niceness, her easygoing emollient blandness, mask the fact that she is not, as might be assumed, doing all right: her manner is a kind of learned invisibility, indicative of an internal emigration into defeat and despair. But it is not too late. This is a very impressive debut.
• On Falling screened at the San Sebastián film festival.
