Some films stay with you. The images and sounds keep coming back. Emotions stirred are still felt.  In one of this film’s final scenes the protagonist, Aurora, played wonderfully by Joanna Santos, has curled in a fetal position sleeping in a cold Glasgow park.  An older man passes by, stops and phones for help. He is worried about her safety and puts his overcoat around her. All this is filmed in  a long shot, we fear the worse for Aurora.  As the camera moves in close we see her awaken and accept the man’s comforting hug. The cameras zooms in and we see in close up her hand clutch his arm closely.

The film is about how the social, material conditions of her life – migration, hostel accommodation and precarious low paid work – made it difficult for her to establish human contact. The touch of family, friends or a lover has been denied.

The desire of the human warmth of another person is captured in an earlier scene where she has gone out for a drink with a Polish man from the same hostel/shared house. Late on, after a few drinks, she rests her head on his shoulder.  After a minute, the guy, slightly embarrassed, silently moves away from her.  One of the worst aspects of loneliness is missing the simple reassurance of a touch, a hug.

What ‘pickers do’

The film is punctuated by repetitive scenes of Aurora doing her job as a picker in this Amazon type warehouse. There is no dialogue as the picker uses a hand held code reader to take the product and check it in to the trolley. The soundtrack is the pinging of this reader which you have to do twice for each product.  For the whole shift you just go up and down these aisles of immense metal shelving.  Without the repetition on screen the reality of this labour would be communicated less effectively.  

The whole time you are monitored remotely online by supervisors who intervene if your workrate is below par. We see this happening with Aurora as a yellow jacketed guy – probably not paid that much more – comes along and tells her to speed up.

On another occasion she is pulled into an office to be congratulated for being one of the fastest pickers of the day. Her reward – she can take a chocolate bar from a basket!  We are also treated to a booster session when the whole workforce is congratulated for hitting some target . The supervisors’ enthusiasm is not matched by any fervour from the audience.  Cupcakes are the reward this time. Aurora sneaks away during the session with an excuse to go to the toilets where she eats three of the cakes.

How this work grinds you down

Looking for another job she wants a day off. She is brusquely refused. Clearly here there is no union to organize any constraints on management.  This is a realistic situation in the private sector where only 12% of workers are unionized.  Amazon has continually succeeded in preventing unions winning negotiating rights in its factories in Britain.

Despite recognizing that this job is soul destroying and poorly paid, Aurora finds the whole interview experience for a care workers job too much. She has been ground down so much she performs badly when asked what she enjoys doing.  Effectively her hostel residence, migrant status, low wages and shift patterns makes it more difficult to have an interesting, fulfilling social or cultural life. Desperately she invents some story of holidaying in the Bahamas.

When the film shows her out of work Aurora is often silently buried in her phone. It is a tragedy when she damages it and the repair costs make a real dent in her income.  The director/writer wants to show us that the exploitation or alienation at work is reproduced in some ways in her leisure time.  It reflects her social isolation from family or friends.

Marx and alienation theory

Marx, particularly in his early writings, is eloquent about how capitalism alienates or separates the worker not just from the fruits of their labour and the ownership of production but the potential of a fulfilled existence. We would include today a separation from mother nature as fossil capital destroys our environment.  For Marx the mechanization of early industrial production made work the repetition of physical tasks dictated by steam powered machines.  Today computers determine a similar alienated labour in warehouses with even more detailed, constant monitoring.

On Falling works so well because it shows rather than tells.  You do not need somebody delivering speeches about exploitation to show its reality today.  Nothing much happens in the film but in a sense everything is happening.  It is a sad, poignant at times, some people even find it slow going.  Through it all a very basic solidarity is shown between both the workers and among the people in the hostel.  Aurora eats badly and is always short of money but the Polish guy lends her money and shares his meal.

The last scene of the movie where she joins in a ball game at the warehouse shows us a glimmer of hope that the humanity of working people can eventually become organised and overcome the inhumanity of a system that alienates their labour and a decent human existence. How ironic that these warehouses are called ‘fulfillment centres’.

Unfortunately you will have to find someone with BFI player or Amazon Prime to see the film.  It only had a very short run on general release. But it is well worth the effort. It is a great movie to start a discussion about work today.

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