Despite wearing the genteel surface appearance of a 19th century costume drama, Unrest is a lightly experimental essay film at heart, suffused with deadpan humour and assembled with surgical precision. Taking home the top prize in the Berlinale’s left-field Encounters section earlier this week, Swiss writer-director Cyril Schäublin’s second feature blends elements of his own family history with semi-fictionalised true events and historical speculation, creating a politically engaged rumination on work, money, power, patriarchy and the tyranny of time itself.
Made on a modest budget with a non-professional cast, Unrest is formally restrained, wry in tone and purposely devoid of major dramatic events. By obstinately refusing to pander to audience expectations, it risks becoming an emotionally aloof exercise in sublime tedium at times. Even so, this is an agreeably original oddity with a strong authorial voice. Further festival play should follow Berlin, with potential for the kind of rarefied theatrical run enjoyed by Schäublin’s prize-winning debut feature Those Who Are Fine (2017).
Schäublin opens Unrest with a gushing quote from Russian writer, geographer and political thinker Pyotr Kropotkin about his conversion to anarchism during a visit to Switzerland in 1872. Setting up this back story via an opening chorus of gossipy Russian women, the film then recreates Kropotkin (Alexei Evstratov) arriving in the sleepy Swiss town of St. Imier, where his official cartography mission becomes entangled with a polite anarchist mutiny brewing among the highly skilled female workers at a local watch factory.
Schäublin paints St. Imier almost like a magical fairy-tale setting, not least because the town officially adheres to four different time zones, each slightly out of sync with the rest. Peopled with genial eccentrics, the prevailing local mood is one of cordial disagreement, even when potentially explosive conflicts arise between bosses and workers, gendarmes and citizens. Sensing an insurrectionary mood growing, factory boss Roulet (Valentin Merz) finally decides to fire anyone with anarchist affiliations, including Josephine (Clara Gostynski), whose job is to fit the “unrest wheel” crucial to the dynamic tension that makes watches function. This double meaning is a gift to Schäublin, arriving late in the story to claim its place as a defining metaphorical motif.
There are big ideas at play in Unrest, about capitalism and its discontents, about the Utopian idealism of early anarcho-communist groups, about competing versions of history and alternatives to the modern nation state. Schäublin allows his characters to share urbane musings on these themes, often delivered with a wink of bone-dry humour. But he mostly concentrates on the hard material facts of commerce and work: lists and numbers, daily pay rates, insurance costs, productivity increases, contractual details and so on. Recalling the data-heavy dialogue in Those Who Are Fine, this stylised approach is purposely mundane, but becomes its own kind of modernist machine poetry.
Although Kropotkin and Josephine are notionally key protagonists, Schäublin has little interest in following them through a conventional, emotionally driven narrative. Unrest spends far less time on plot or character development than it does on meticulously detailed close-ups of watch-making in all its delicate, forensic precision. This miniature cosmos of springs and spirals, cogs and cranks, pins and wheels makes for strangely hypnotic viewing when blown up to big screen dimensions.
Unrest demands our indulgence with its heavily mannered style and cryptic intentions, but it rewards patient viewers. Filmed like a naturalistic documentary, it is is largely composed of static camera shots and widescreen observational views, with humans often relegated to a corner of the canvas. A slow panning shot late in the story stands out for its rarity and its playful subversion of expectations. There is no score, only an ever-present audio track layered with superlative sound design that emphasises rhythmic repetition through birdsong, ticking clocks, mechanised factory routines and more. This austere sonic backdrop helps make two rousing choral interludes that emerge organically from the narrative all the more effective.
Director, screenwriter, editor: Cyril Schäublin
Cast: Clara Gostynski, Alexei Evstratov, Monika Stalder, Hélio Thiémard, Li Tavor, Valentin Merz, Laurence Bretignier, Laurent Ferrero, Mayo Irion, Daniel Stähli
Cinematography: Silvan Hillmann
Music: Li Tavor
Sound design: Miguel Cabral Moraes
Producers: Linda Vogel, Michela Pini
Production company: Seeland Filmproduktion (Switzerkand)
Wold sales: Alpha Violet, Paris
Venue: Berlin International Film Festival (Encounters)
In Swiss-German, French, Russian
93 minutes
