Hard Labor (2011)

Venue: Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival


Financial networks or petrified werewolves? Marco Dutra and Juliana Rojas' new film Hard Labor makes it difficult to distinguish between the two. The film depicts a petit-bourgeois family in midst of the "great recession," that is contemporary urban Brazil, which could be any other city. Helena opens a grocery store in a shop with tall ceilings, a risky financial venture since her husband, Octavio, has just been laid off. Octavio tries in vain to network and get interviews, as Helena manages her store with characteristic bourgeois neurosis. Meanwhile, they hire Paula as live-in maid, paying her under the table and below minimum wage.

A set up for an urban realist melodrama is beset by horror film motifs--a snarling black dog across the street from the store, an invisible presence that sets off motion detectors, black bile leaking from the floorboards. As Octavio attempts to regain entry into the world of white collar work, Helena's grocery store is practically deserted, and another presence continues to make itself felt. At the film's climax, Helena discovers a petrified werewolf behind a spreading stain in the wall. Characteristic of the global middle class, Helena and Octavio would rather not confront the skeletons they find in the closet, however strange and improbable they may be, so they take the corpse and burn it in the forest.
Although Variety calls the film heavy handed in its political symbolism, "with its implicit -- even explicit -- message that capitalism is a malignant mildew on the social contract," it is not so clear cut how exactly the black bile, the werewolf, its ghost, work as symbols in the film. Granted, this is probably what the film "says," yet its manner of speaking is quite a bit more subtle. Its unconventional, and arguably unsatisfying, take on the horror genre, is no doubt a comment on the genre, as well as the framing device of the realist melodrama.

The term realist melodrama is perhaps hard to stomach. After all, the melodramatic and the realist stand at opposing ends of film history. Yet, we've seen quite a few of this genre in recent times. Asghar Farhadi's A Separation proves that you can combine cinema with static cameras, non-expressive faces, and relatively long takes with an unfurling web of dramatic entanglements and still win the dubious honor of best foreign language film at the Academy Awards. The ready combination of realist, film festival style with melodramatic temporality should tell us something about our reality. Absent in the dramatic web spun between a middle class nuclear family, the help, and the bureaucracy, of course is that other world that makes it possible--the world of Capital.

The thriller and the horror film, on the other hand, has always been about capitalism. The invisible hands of the market and the universe of exchange value work by not being seen, and hence they ally themselves with that older set of invisible movers: ghosts, mythical creatures, gods, black bile. Werewolves are somewhere in between, they leave the human world according to celestial motions, yet in classic horror films they are clearly subject to diegetic temporality, as the ghastly other to narrative denouement. That Hard Labor petrifies its werewolf and hides it behind a plaster wall is no doubt significant, since it realizes that such monsters are not the thing itself, but merely signs of what is not there. It is no accident of course that black bile is Greek for melancholia, that feeling of having lost something but not knowing what. Melancholia is not a blue planet--the blue planet is a silly reminder of something we lost (which is why Lars Van Trier's film remains a brilliant response to Avatar). Black bile in Hard Labor is not, as Greek medicine had it, the cause of melancholia, but only its external manifestation, easily explained by by the clump of werewolf fur stuck in the sewage pipes.

So why "hard labor"? The film's title comes up about five minutes into the film, as Octavio and Helene are mopping away the cockroaches in the store. Ironically enough, all the forms of labor we witness in the film are what Italian Marxists would call "affective labor"--service industry work, phone banking for life insurance, managing and working a grocery store. If the monster at the bottom these spectacular displays of fixed and circulating of capital we call cinema is really, as Marx saw it, surplus labor power, then we have a sense as to why, to our not so heartfelt disappointment, the real monster doesn't show up. Or it does show up, but as archaeological ruins, as an event that is already passed. When the werewolf is finally revealed, as a black shape falling through plaster wall, the camera lingers several seconds on the hole it leaves. The empty frame characterizes the film's editing style: it chooses not to fulfill, but to record the absence of event. It subtracts the moment of cognition from melodramatic time (when the character realizes that its finally too late),  and the living, unveiled, monster from the horror film sequence. The film's most brilliant moment takes place somewhere at its midpoint, as Helena returns to her store in the middle of the night only to find an invisible presence that sets off the motion-activated jingling Santa Claus mannequin set up in the store for Christmas cheer. As she hears the mannequin jingle, Helena disappears behind the aisle to find the source of the sound. Rather than following her, the camera is set on tracks, tracking left into the other aisle, as she, or rather, the motion sensors, see the ghost again. There it is: Santa Claus, or Christ, animated by the ghostly presence, and here we are, seeing it through a static camera, or rather seeing its absence.