破败工厂

Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Pinho’sTHE NOTHING FACTORY takes home the FIPRESCI Prize in Cannes, with the jury’s verdict as follows:"An evocative activist film that blows the boundaries between reality, fiction, theater and sociological discourse leading to an unsettling and provocative cinematic experience.” but, it is an overstatement, because there is nothing unsettling and provocative in this meandering docu-drama, a hodgepodge of didactic, verbose theoretical discussions and workadaymiserabilism perpetuating around a cohort of blue-collar workers who are saddled with a massive layoff.

Most courageously, the film offers its audience a fine-tooth combing of the downside of capitalism, and hammers home the inevitability of its failing which is behind the lift-manufacturing factory’s dodgy maneuver, smuggling heavy machines out in the night, so they can start anew in other places while ditching the current one with their labor surplus. But it suffers from being a typical talk-the-talk endeavor which to this reviewer’s lights, is flogging a dead horse.

After negotiating with the shysters hired by the factory owner reaches a standstill, summarily, the workers are left with a half-empty factory and they decide to operate the business on their own despite that no one is equipped with the know-how of management. Anticlimactically, a seemingly propitious order from Argentina doesn’t necessarily elicit the hardship-defying mettle which the story-line half-heartedly suggests, apart from an out-of-nowhere musical sequence, whose feigned elation comes a bit too late to dispel the dreadful tenor holding its stranglehold on this nearly 3-hour long realism-evoking overreacher.

Character-arc straggles unsystematically, and what Pinho and his team actually excel is the atmospheric construct: a disconsolate Lisbon colored with invariably somber hue refracts Pinho's own personalistic rumination of the city and his compassion to his beleaguered subjects might not be immediately felt, because self-consciously he knows he is trying to tackle with something much bigger, but to little avail (it is not that a solution is a requisite, but Pinho’s scattershot pieces simply do not cohere as a narrative feature). Just like the contrived materialization of a bevy of ostriches loping in the wilderness during the film's middle passage, he intends to speak for those ostracized, marginalized, underprivileged, but visionary illumination is in dire paucity.

referential point: Miguel Gomes’ARABIAN NIGHT: VOLUME 3 - THE ENCHANTED ONE (2015, 6.3/10)

破败工厂

变故，一直以来都被人们所排斥，原因在于被动的接受环境带来的改变，以及因为变故而给生活带来的影响，本片就讲述了一群遭遇了变故的工人的故事，老板受中国产品的影响，产品滞销，迫不得已要关闭工厂，并对工人进行补偿，而工人希望的不仅仅是赔偿，而是保持生活与工作的稳定。对话失败，这注定是一场没有硝烟，没有赢家的战争。

资方希望尽快解决以止损，劳方则希望保持工作，当管理者消失工人们开始自救时，开始化被动为主动，适应变故的同时寻求新的出路；改变是痛苦的，一如接受现实，当生存受到威胁的时候，人们自然会放弃信念，工人说，如果我的孩子明天就要挨饿，那我今天一定会去领取补偿金！尊严已经不重要了，只要我的孩子们可以有饭吃，工人们的内部也并非团结，相互之间仅存一点点共患难的信任，包括对公会也不能信任，寻找是一段成长和蜕变。当人们换上工装，不知道要做什么的时候，影片运用了长时间的静音处理，死一般的寂静，隐藏不住每个人内心的暗潮汹涌！时代在改变，高效的运行方式势必然取代低效。

工厂是这样，社会亦同样。当人们习惯了被管理的思维，自治便成为一件可笑的事情，因为竟然没有愿意承担责任与风险的管理者，一切又回到原点。