A relentlessly bleak drama about migrant workers trapped in low-paid seasonal jobs in Britain’s run-down coastal regions, Great Yarmouth – Provisional Figures is one of the more gruelling world premieres currently screening in competition at San Sebastian film festival. But this grimly compelling feature from Portuguese director Marco Martins also has the slow-burn tension of a crime thriller, the grungy look of a torture-porn horror movie, and the bracingly amoral nihilism of film noir. An unflinching depiction of Brexit Britain as a kind of purgatorial doomscape, it should strike a timely chord with resilient viewers, proving socially engaged cinema can come in more artful packages than worthy docu-drama. Martins and co-writer Ricardo Adolfo based their screenplay on the accounts of real economic migrants.
The sordid depths of human depravity on display in Great Yarmouth – Provisional Figures, tinged with sexual sadism and casual cruelty, have some of the coolly aloof voyeurism of Austrian hybrid documentary-maker Ulrich Seidl, whose controversial new film Sparta also premiered in San Sebastian this week. Indeed, Martins is arguably open to similar charges of exploitative poverty-porn. But there is also a poetry in his film’s slimy, shabby, colour-drained look which transcends gritty realism for something more heightened and universal. The ethics of aestheticised squalor are highly questionable, of course, but this bracingly dour outsider’s take on Britain’s shameful mistreatment of foreign workers is far from a cheap holiday in other people’s misery.
Set in late 2019, just as new Brexit rules began to bite, Great Yarmouth – Provisional Figures takes place in the eponymous coastal town in eastern England, once a thriving seaside resort, now an impoverished gathering point for poorly paid foreign work gangs at the sharp end of Britain’s farming and food-processing industry. The anti-heroine at the heart of this story is Tânia (Beatriz Batada), a hard-nosed Portuguese woman working as “mother” to the seasonal workers arriving from her homeland. Normally cast in more glamorous roles, British-Portuguese beauty Batada is made to look haggard and careworn here, mostly by a queasy colour palette and unflattering lighting.
A former factory worker herself, Tânia now is now in a more managerial intermediary role. She is also married to a British man, Richard (Ken Loach veteran Kris Hitchin), who inherited a chain of run-down hotels from his family. The couple run a lucrative illicit side business filling these human battery farms with Portuguese workers and charging them rent. But Richard is also a hot-tempered bully with addiction problems, while Tânia is quietly making risky escape plans involving secret lovers, stolen cash and her own separate business scheme.
The exploited workforce depicted here are forced out of bed around 3 am to travel to a poultry processing plant, a hellish production line of blood, filth and industrial slaughter which resembles a concentration camp more than a factory. The appalling conditions of underclass factory life shown here, dangerous and draining, appear to have changed little since Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle more than a century ago. This grim scenario takes an even darker turn with the death of a sick worker in murky criminal circumstances, which Tânia is obliged to cover up. Then the dead man’s brother Carlos (Nuno Lopes) arrives in Great Yarmouth, looking for answers, but also for work. A panicked Tânia tries to distract him with rough sex and employment offers, but their affair becomes an obsessive, guilt-wracked, and self-destructive.
Great Yarmouth – Provisional Figures is not without flaws. Too much of the narrative is grindingly joyless one-note melodrama, with little room for love or humour or hope. Martins also skimps too much on character depth, especially the thinly drawn migrant workers. All the same, this grim commentary on Brexit-era Britain is shot through a greasy, grimy, grubby lens that is consistently interesting on an aesthetic level. If the young David Fincher had made a Ken Loach social drama, it might have looked as clammy and grungy as this.
A structural framing device, contrasting the horrors of the factory workers with the beauty of a nearby salt-marsh bird sanctuary, lends the film a pleasingly lyrical dimension. Music and sound design also play key roles, with Tânia using karaoke and line-dancing to blank out her grisly life choices, She also repeatedly whispers the same handful of phrases from her shaky English-language lessons as a protective mantra, which eventually become a kind of absurdist poetic motif with Samuel Beckett overtones. A weeping, string-heavy score by Jim Williams is a little too on-the-nose, but a cut-away scene in which the deserted chicken-processing production line dances along to Vivaldi is a pleasingly surreal touch.
Director: Marco Martins
Screenplay: Ricardo Adolfo, Marco Martins
Cast: Beatriz Batarda, Kris Hitchen, Bob Elliott, Romeu Runa, Victor Lourenço, Nuno Lopes, Rita Cabaço
Cinematography: João Ribeiro AIP
Editing: Karen Harley, Mariana Gaivão, Marco Martins
Music: Jim Williams
Production companies: Uma Pedro No Sapato (Portugal), Les Films d’Apres-Midi (France), Elation Pictures (UK)
World sales: LevelK, Denmark
Venue: San Sebastian International Film Festival (Official Selection)
In English, Portuguese
113 minutes
