In official selection at the San Sebastian festival, another first fiction film, that of the Portuguese director Laura Carreira, already the author of noted short films. On Falling focuses on the daily life of Aurora, a young immigrant in Scotland, and questions the living conditions imposed on these uprooted and precarious workers and the loneliness that results from it.
4 min
From our special correspondent in San Sebastian,
Thick silhouettes, wrapped in down jackets, filmed from behind in a long corridor. It is autumn and cold outside. Men and women who pass through a metal turnstile that only lets them pass one by one. We think of animals being led to the slaughterhouse or cows in an automated milking parlor; these are people going to work.
The camera focuses on Aurora’s wanderings in the aisles of a huge warehouse: she is pickerthat is to say, she fills trolleys with various objects (books, crying bather, games, rope, etc.) ordered on the internet. She scans barcodes one after the other: on the shelf, on the ordered object, on the trolley… A working life punctuated by the click of the scanner which gets impatient and beeps when the pace is not sustained enough. If the employee is fast, on the other hand, he is rewarded with a chocolate bar. Her work finished, Aurora returns to the apartment she shares with several other young foreigners, Spaniards and Poles, who have come to look for work in Scotland.
Behind closed doors
Aurora’s life is a life behind closed doors: her room in the apartment – filmed in semi-darkness –, the communal and impersonal kitchen where the tenants cross paths and exchange a few words, the car of a Portuguese colleague who also brings her home from work at nightfall and the warehouse. Little daylight, little openness to the outside world, with two exceptions in the film, reflecting what Aurora’s life is: a reclusive life. Moreover, when, in a job interview, Aurora is asked what her favorite hobbies are, she doesn’t know what to say… The laundromat? And bursts into tears.
A great solitude with only one “companion”, his mobile phone, a sort of double of the chain scanner, which he uses to scroll endlessly through videos, information on the weather, cooking recipes… Moreover, the only real living spaces and therefore of exchanges are the places where meals are eaten: the company cafeteria and the apartment kitchen. But here again, communication is reduced, the women’s favorite topic of conversation being the series they follow on television. A theme that goes round and round.
and curls
The film is made of loops, of repetitions, like Aurora’s life about whose intimacy we will know nothing. She is the archetype of many young migrant workers, as was also the director Laura Carreirain Scotland too. And to prepare for this role, the actress Joana Santos, who is carrying the film on her shoulders, says she spent two months isolated in an apartment in Scotland. With great modesty and restraint, she makes the young woman’s growing distress perceptible.
On Falling echoes another Portuguese film discovered in San Sebastian two years ago, Great Yarmouth provisional figuresreleased in France in 2023 and which similarly focused on the living conditions of migrants and the exploitation they are victims of. No violence in this latest film except that of an economic organization that oppresses the precarious and feeds off their exploitation in all good conscience. What is the human cost of such a life, Laura Carreira asks implicitly? What Will We Do When We Have No Money? The beautiful ballad of the Irish group Lankum closes the film. Alienating one’s life to earn it and barely earn it, the price to pay is very high and this sensitive film tells it very well.