Remember Michael Ende’s Momo (1973)? Although technically considered youth literature, this landmark novel critiqued the modern and industrialised conception of time.
Ende tells the story of Momo, a young orphan girl who fights against the ominous Gray Gentlemen of the Timesaving Bank. In her film On Falling (2024), director and writer Laura Carreira identifies the seemingly harmless but insidious upgrade of these ethereal Gray Gentlemen in today’s society.
Competing in the Official Selection at the San Sebastian International Film Festival and sharing the Best Director award with Pedro Martín-Calero’s The Wailing, On Falling offers a raw depiction of Aurora’s everyday life, a young Portuguese woman working in a commercial warehouse in suburban Scotland.
Laura Carreira’s work is a torpedo below the waterline to companies such as Amazon and the broader “New Corporate America”, the business ideology that has metastasised into English-speaking countries and continues its sanctimonious expansion into Central Europe. Hidden behind the benevolent, cult-like ideal of a ‘healthy work culture’ that elevates employees, New Corporate America is characterised by intense employee surveillance, polite harassment and emotional blackmailing, among other traits.
By reclaiming the core social role of cinema as a tool to denounce injustice, the film encourages the audience to make small but meaningful changes in their everyday decisions.
The hypocrisy is beautifully depicted when the warehouse managers gather all workers, including Aurora, at a mandatory meeting. They are forced to watch a promotional video from an environmental charity, only to be encouraged afterwards to make their contributions. A mixture of rage and secondhand embarrassment hits the spectator as they listen to managers announce such hypocritical parole, embellished by toxic positivity. Aurora, who recently failed to pay her weekly electricity bill in her shared flat, decides to escape the ambush going to the toilet, not without an accusatory remark from another manager.
The viewer might have expected that a monotonous job of just scanning barcodes and picking objects in a warehouse would be alienating without much intervention from the company itself. However, the film presents a culture of extreme time-scrutiny that not only incentivises the termination of any social interaction but also creates very blurry boundaries that extend beyond Aurora’s workhours. Consequently, she is unable to cut through the inertia of the warehouse, and her personal life is tainted by an overwhelming homogeneous greyness.
On Falling immerses the spectator on a carefully-crafted story where every dialogue (or non-dialogue) is an echo of young men and women sharing a flat in London, LA, Sydney, or Madrid. From the other side of the screen, you will see yourself silently cheering for Aurora. Caught halfway between hope and helplessness, the viewer becomes engaged in willing her to recognise the existence of those invisible chains that bind her.
By reclaiming the core social role of cinema as a tool to denounce injustice, the film encourages the audience to make small but meaningful changes in their everyday decisions.
Main image supplied.
