Int’l Critics Line: Marco Martins’ ‘Great Yarmouth: Provisional Figures’
30.09.2022 - 18:59
/ deadline.com
An authentic insight into migrant workers in Britain, the feature drama Great Yarmouth: Provisional Figures is an engrossing work that premiered in the San Sebastian Film Festival competition. Directed by Marco Martins (Alice), who co-writes with Ricardo Adolfo, it follows the tough life of Tânia (a superb Beatriz Batarda), who supervises her fellow Portuguese workers in the dilapidated seaside town of Great Yarmouth. Based on interviews with many migrants, it’s a hard-hitting look at working conditions and the moral compromises made by desperate people.
Set over several months in late 2019, before Brexit, it sees Tânia woken up by a bird that’s flown into her modest home. Woozily opening a window to set it free, she prepares for her day in a turkey factory, where the captive poultry have no such luck. It’s shocking to see the way the birds are treated in this cramped abattoir, and it’s clearly a metaphor for the workers, who are cooped up in grotty hotel rooms and leave their shifts covered with blood and feces.
It’s a heavily signaled but compelling comparison, and you get the feeling that Tânia would love to set them all free. Instead, she hardens her face and her heart to keep the workers at their stations, taking their passports and charging them for their miserable digs.
Having married an idiotic English hotel owner, Richard (Sorry We Missed You’s Kris Hitchen), Tânia has worked her way up, and is saving up ill gotten gains with dreams of a better life. She shares her plans for a refurbished hotel with sometime lover Raúl (Romeu Runa), and their hopes lead to some of the film’s more upbeat scenes. Gazing through the window of a successful hotel, they smile at elderly women line dancing, perhaps amused but also
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