Human beings have always preferred not to think about the suffering involved in getting food to their shops, fuel to their bunkers, clothes to their cupboards. The Victorian middle classes put juvenile factory workers from their minds. It was more comfortable not to ponder the life of the coal miner.
This still goes on. But, if anything, the sufferings have become more obscure, harder to fully grasp. Much of the debate around online shopping focuses on what those businesses have done to traditional outlets. There is a lot of worry about who is not working. Many of us think of the warehouses as vast systems stocked and managed solely by machines. The miners had brass bands. The warehouse workers barely exist in the shoppers’ minds.
Laura Carreira’s extraordinary On Falling, one of the best British debuts of the past 12 months, does an unsettling job of telling us the things we don’t want to hear. Its fictionalised revelations about how items make it from shelf to post box bear comparison with those in Upton Sinclair’s classic 1904 novel The Jungle.
That story of Chicago’s meat-packing industry was brutal, sweaty, bruised. The indignities here are more subtle and insidious. The film, set in an unnamed Scottish city, plays like the grimmest science fiction. It’s tough. And emotionally wearing. I imagine Carreira, born in Portugal, long resident in Edinburgh, was nervous before its premiere at Toronto International Film Festival.
“I guess when you work on something for so long you start questioning if anyone’s going to understand what it’s about,” she says. “It was beautiful, because, in that first screening, the audience was just so involved. They were saying these beautiful things. They were putting the film into words in a way that I couldn’t have. Ever since, in other countries, we hear new ideas.”
On Falling stars Joana Santos as Aurora, a Portuguese immigrant working long hours as a picker for an online retailer. The basics of the job are pretty much as you might expect. She wheels a trolley through endless aisles and, recording her progress on a barcode reader, transports products to the dispatch point.
What makes the film so unnerving is its treatment of the invisible management structures and alienating accommodation arrangements. When Aurora, who seems deadened to all life, tries to get a day off for a job interview she is directed towards an app on her phone. It’s not just that she can’t talk to a higher authority. There doesn’t seem to be a higher authority. There is only a dystopian video game to tell her it is too late to make such a request.
“That was not a surprise,” Carreira says. “Because, by that time, when I already started interviewing pickers, I had read enough about those environments to know the grievances. But the film introduces this idea of finding it hard to put blame on someone. The managers themselves were doing their job. That was something I got even got from pickers. I would ask sometimes, ‘What’s your relationship with managers?’ They would say, ‘Well, we get different managers. So it’s not always the same person. And, you know, their job is almost worse than mine.”
That’s a capitalist ploy even Karl Marx didn’t imagine. Convince everyone in the building they are in the employ of a soulless technology. It gets worse. A chilling final scene presses home the extent to which Aurora and her colleagues have been infantilised. We have been prepared for this by an earlier incident in which she is summoned into the office to be told she has exceeded targets. The reward? Her pick of chocolate bars from a cardboard box. “Good choice,” her boss says when she goes for (if I remember correctly) a Wispa. It is infuriating. It is blackly comic. It is also deeply sad.
“That was something a few pickers would talk about,” Carreira says. “Even when you were one of the top ones, the rewards were so ridiculous it was almost more insulting than not getting anything. In all the screenings we’ve been doing around the world, from America to Egypt, that scene is always the one that gets the most reaction. It is a universal sentiment: not feeling correctly rewarded for your hard work.”
Is the infantilisation deliberate or just a byproduct of the alienating conditions?
“I don’t think it’s an accident,” she says. “When you don’t give people agency to have control over how they work, then obviously this is the result. I think that was clear through many different parts of the routine.”
Carreira, who speaks perfect English with a faint Portuguese accent and a fainter Scottish one, moved from her country of birth in 2012, “during the worst economic crisis”. The lack of university tuition fees drew her from England to Scotland, where she enrolled in a film course at Edinburgh College of Art.
“I didn’t make a big plan of moving permanently,” she says “I came to study, and now, 12 years from then, I’m still here.”
Even before On Falling premiered, Carreira had developed a reputation as a chronicler of Scottish life. Characters from two of her fine shorts, Red Hill and The Shift, make appearances in On Falling. I jokily suggest she is constructing her own interlocked narrative space as did Anthony Trollope (or do I mean Balzac?), and she doesn’t laugh at my pretention. I hardly need to ask if she now sees herself as a Scottish film-maker as well as a Portuguese one. She is surely that.
“Oh, completely. All the films I’ve done are set in Scotland,” she says. “So, yeah, I very much see myself as Portuguese and Scottish. It’s a weird one. Because I feel here I talk a lot about Portugal. But when I go to Portugal I don’t shut up about Scotland. I have the two homes.”
She doesn’t need to explain that to an Irish person. If we haven’t been there, we have a close relative who has. Produced by Sixteen Films, which was cofounded by Ken Loach and his producer Rebecca O’Brien, On Falling obviously draws on Carreira’s experiences as an immigrant to Scotland. But the challenges of the migrant warehouse employee are particular. Aurora lives in a house with workers from all countries. Everyone has their own cupboard for their food. Dinner is often a processed-cheese sandwich on white bread. Connections with the outer world are so fleeting we could be in almost any western European city (though the weather offers a few clues).
For me, the most moving moment comes when Aurora breaks her phone and retires depressed to bed for the 24 hours it will take to get the screen fixed. To that point, like everyone else in the 21st century, she has communicated more with the device than with those around her. One feels divided. On the one hand, this is not fleshed-out human communication. On the other, maybe the device does allow immigrants a partial escape from loneliness earlier generations didn’t enjoy.
“Yeah, completely,” Carreira says. “They’re also addictive for a reason. I think they’re touching on a longing that we’re all experiencing. Where we feel we’re not connecting with people. And so we look for that connection. And the phone is designed to be highly addictive for that specific reason – to touch where it hurts. But also separating her. I wanted that complexity to be there. The phone is her best friend.”
On Falling, winner of best director at the venerable San Sebastián International Film Festival, has generated raves wherever it has played. It is focused in its targets, but it also speaks to wider alienation in contemporary society. That will help get a second feature made. But we know the business is as tough as it has ever been.
“I think this film showed that there’s an audience out there that is connecting with these stories,” she says, optimistically. “I think that itself is a good. That’s what we have to gain from how the film has been received. So I want to carry that into the next films. The next film is also being developed with Sixteen Films and with Film4. It’s going to be about work. I’m going to move into the office space.”
And what about exercising the Portuguese half of her sensibility? Or maybe somewhere else altogether?
“I’m open to it,” she says. “There are stories to be found anywhere. This is the place I feel most comfortable writing stories about, because I can write them from a point of view of knowing what the place is like.”
On Falling is in cinemas from Friday, March 7th
