Review by Beatrice On 23-Jun-2023
Abby argues with her husband, who wants to sell the car she uses to get to work: Ricky wants to convince her to buy a van on installments to start making deliveries.
Abby has to constantly move during her workday, visiting the homes of the elderly, and those with physical and mental disabilities, who she must physically care for; but dedicating about two to three hours a day to each person requires exhausting work, both psychologically and physically, plus the travel time, leaving her with minimal time for her family. Ricky and Abby have two children: Liza Jane, a young and brilliant girl who witnesses the growing problems of the family, also strained by the behavior of her teenage brother Seb, who reacts to the situation by creating a world of his own, almost entirely excluding school.
But the descent into the hell of work dictated by time, technology, and the madness of a market that has lost control begins with Ricky, who embarks on the "career" of contemporary exploitation par excellence: that of a home delivery courier.
The first interview with the manager is immediately misleading: "You won't work for us, Ricky, but WITH us," which evidently means that he will be an apparently independent worker in terms of expenses but completely dependent on the delivery schedule, delivery times, that infernal device that tracks his every move, monitors every delay, customer control, and the impossibility of having other commitments unless he finds a substitute, without whom he would have to pay a hefty fine.
When the worker presents himself on the market, he sells, like everyone else, his merchandise, which, in his case, is labor power. Whoever buys it wants it all for themselves, forgetting that the worker needs time, not only to satisfy his physical needs but especially for the satisfaction of his intellectual and social needs, whose extent and number are determined by the general state of civilization. But since for the capitalist, work time belongs solely to the self-valorization of capital, the time for education as human beings, for intellectual development, for the fulfillment of social functions, for social relations, for the free play of vital and mental energies, even the festive Sunday time, for capital, in its boundless and blind impulse, in its werewolf-like voracity, these needs are pure and simple frills.
Ken Loach does not hesitate to meticulously follow the living conditions of that contemporary worker who, in the absence of the customer to whom he has to deliver the package, leaves the note: “SORRY we missed you,” and for this, he will not be paid.
Ken Loach does not forget to capture a reality that goes radically beyond the labor alienation for which people fought in the post-war period. In the current condition, these workers have no one to fight against, no one to exercise their rights against, no one to demand dignified conditions from, no aspiration to a life that maintains even the slightest human detail.
The family unit of Ricky and Abby, despite their efforts and hopes, lives sucked into a vortex that leaves no emotional or affectionate space for the family; coming home is limited to the few hours needed to sleep.
The long chain of necessary films to which the artistic journey of Loach and Laverty has educated us reappears in this latest one in all its absolute contemporaneity: that of the economic model based on gig economy work; that of self-employed or on-call workers from agencies, with the consequent job insecurity and the risks that follow for professional and private life.
A film that inevitably makes the need for online shopping more difficult and less indifferent: witnessing that "sophisticated" technology, provided on loan to the worker, that dictates routes, allows the customer to know exactly where the shipment they ordered is, its expected delivery time which must be exact if an extra fee was paid, while the customer, more or less consciously, is not minimally informed of the rhythms to which the forced delivery person is subjected.
The apotheosis of exploitation! A tool that controls a man with total disregard for the most basic physiological needs...
In ancient Greece, animals were sacrificed to win the favor of the gods; today, men are sacrificed to accommodate the madness of the market, which flatters customers, making them both victims and executioners.
Ricky experiences the alienation of installments, the risks he faces every day of being attacked and having to pay the expenses, of losing his job, of meeting the demands dictated by a technology that does not account for unforeseen events.
Abby experiences the exploitation of working 12/14 hours a day but being paid only for the actual and scheduled time, i.e., 6/7 hours, at the minimum wage. Despite being a wonderful wife and mother, she struggles to care for her own children, finding herself forced to give them instructions over the phone.
She works for an agency, and the work of home care assistants is contracted out by municipalities to external agencies or private care homes that get contracts because they charge lower prices.
Loach and Laverty do not fail to open explicitly comical humanistic glimpses, such as the heated discussion between Ricky and a chubby customer, the only episode of football rivalry that seems to put them on the same level!
Abby is confronted with photos of collective coffee gatherings of an elderly woman during the 1984 miners' strike: the strike, a tool beyond the imagination of our protagonists!
Market, consumption, exploitation, precariousness, control.
Ken Loach confirms himself as the most effective portraitist of the working world; over all these years, he has worked, interpreted, told, and filmed the path of the dissolution of work.
His has been the chronicle of a death foretold: that of the perverse mechanisms of work that considers the human as a technical accessory to an unknowable, abstract, and ferocious machine/market that has a single irrational purpose and therefore an exclusively miserable effect: profit.
In fact, he does not portray the failure of the market economy, which does not care about our quality of life, but the logical evolution of the market, the consequence of wild competition to reduce costs and optimize profits.
That money that had freed servants from masters is today the ultimate goal, the symbolic generator of all values: people are considered solely as producers and consumers, tied in an extreme vicious circle whereby if you don't consume, you don't produce, and if you don't produce, unemployment and poverty in general increase. Therefore, we are all "invited" to forced consumption, dictated by induced need: and for this, father market "gifts" us our daily delivery.
Capitalism has survived communism. Good. Now capitalism devours itself.
23-Jun-2023 by Beatrice