Hard Labour
In London an Oriental man suddenly stepped out in front of me in Berwick Street and demanded to know where Chinatown was. Is it terribly racist of me to have felt like saying 'You should know'? I was on my way to the London Film Festival. Once more I got to tread the red carpet that was there for something I wasn't seeing. None of the assembled photographers acknowledged me. Shallow bastards.
'Are there going to be any famous people here?', asked a naive woman in Vue Screen 6. Not unless they don't want to be seen, I thought to myself. The film was Hard Labour, a Brazilian drama in which a woman's attempt to run a grocery store is undermined not only by the economic situation (her husband has just been made redundant) but by - SPOILER ALERT - the corpse of a werewolf that's walled up on the premises. Most critics felt that the horror elements did not mix well with the rest of it, and I could indeed see why a dead werewolf might be considered an irrelevance in a social drama; but it worked for me. It was interesting to see the way the couple reacted to the beastly corpse. Not like people in a horror film, running around screaming, but quietly disposing of the body as if it represented their secret shame.
Which it does: it's as though the husband's feeling of redundancy has been made manifest in these grotesque, absurd remains, which are helping to poison the wife's business venture (because traditional masculinity dictates that if she succeeds, then he is doubly shamed). A dead werewolf also functions perfectly well as a symbol for dehumanisation, emasculation, something rotten in the heart of the system, and - well, you name it, a dead werewolf symbolises it as far as this viewer is concerned.
I am painfully aware that not everyone else thinks like me. The film even taps into the 'shame' of watching a B-horror movie instead of a respectable social drama, which is one reason why I fear people won't get it. By the end, I was starting to convince myself that I was the only person in the room who really understood it, and that included the writer-director (one of the writer-directors, at any rate). I mean, he did seem awfully young. No doubt I am wrong - someone selected it for this festival, didn't they? - but it didn't help that the last audience comment in the Q&A (which I was far too timid to join in) came from a woman who praised the film highly - but mainly, it seemed, because it had been shot in and around where she used to live, and her old teacher was in it. She even asked the director to 'say hello from me!' when he went back to Brazil.
So anyway, I'm taking to the internet to say it: Hard Labour - great film. But you probably won't like it.
'Are there going to be any famous people here?', asked a naive woman in Vue Screen 6. Not unless they don't want to be seen, I thought to myself. The film was Hard Labour, a Brazilian drama in which a woman's attempt to run a grocery store is undermined not only by the economic situation (her husband has just been made redundant) but by - SPOILER ALERT - the corpse of a werewolf that's walled up on the premises. Most critics felt that the horror elements did not mix well with the rest of it, and I could indeed see why a dead werewolf might be considered an irrelevance in a social drama; but it worked for me. It was interesting to see the way the couple reacted to the beastly corpse. Not like people in a horror film, running around screaming, but quietly disposing of the body as if it represented their secret shame.
Which it does: it's as though the husband's feeling of redundancy has been made manifest in these grotesque, absurd remains, which are helping to poison the wife's business venture (because traditional masculinity dictates that if she succeeds, then he is doubly shamed). A dead werewolf also functions perfectly well as a symbol for dehumanisation, emasculation, something rotten in the heart of the system, and - well, you name it, a dead werewolf symbolises it as far as this viewer is concerned.
I am painfully aware that not everyone else thinks like me. The film even taps into the 'shame' of watching a B-horror movie instead of a respectable social drama, which is one reason why I fear people won't get it. By the end, I was starting to convince myself that I was the only person in the room who really understood it, and that included the writer-director (one of the writer-directors, at any rate). I mean, he did seem awfully young. No doubt I am wrong - someone selected it for this festival, didn't they? - but it didn't help that the last audience comment in the Q&A (which I was far too timid to join in) came from a woman who praised the film highly - but mainly, it seemed, because it had been shot in and around where she used to live, and her old teacher was in it. She even asked the director to 'say hello from me!' when he went back to Brazil.
So anyway, I'm taking to the internet to say it: Hard Labour - great film. But you probably won't like it.
posted by martin at 11:23 AM
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