This brief documentary profiling a Pakistani shopkeeper in Barcelona opens with an earnest shot of a lowly, hard-working immigrant, and all seems set fair for a worthy, hand-wringing look at the global society we've created.
Far from it. Very soon it becomes clear that the film-maker wants primarily to portray the tailor as a person, as a flawed man. He bullies and fleeces his employees, deceives and harangues his customers, and is selfish, shiftless and lazy. Unlike many short films on global migration (which this is emphatically not), this story is the opposite of the 'success through hard work' model, but rather an unexpected tour of the Peter Principle.
His secondary aim is to show the reality of life for the world's social flotsam, as the characters reveal the choices they face, the pittance they earn, the battle they fight for basic human needs. In this respect the film is interesting rather than ground-breaking, contrasting the good characters in the film with the tailor, as unfortunates whose bad luck is a tragedy, while his is just desserts.
The film-maker's skill is his transparency, or more probably his temporary absences, which push the characters into behaving with no self-awareness. This creates some very amusing episodes, one of which is accidentally ingenious, which I will not ruin, but which involves the two protagonists discussing the film-maker himself, with richly ironic asides about the film in which they are the stars.
Far from it. Very soon it becomes clear that the film-maker wants primarily to portray the tailor as a person, as a flawed man. He bullies and fleeces his employees, deceives and harangues his customers, and is selfish, shiftless and lazy. Unlike many short films on global migration (which this is emphatically not), this story is the opposite of the 'success through hard work' model, but rather an unexpected tour of the Peter Principle.
His secondary aim is to show the reality of life for the world's social flotsam, as the characters reveal the choices they face, the pittance they earn, the battle they fight for basic human needs. In this respect the film is interesting rather than ground-breaking, contrasting the good characters in the film with the tailor, as unfortunates whose bad luck is a tragedy, while his is just desserts.
The film-maker's skill is his transparency, or more probably his temporary absences, which push the characters into behaving with no self-awareness. This creates some very amusing episodes, one of which is accidentally ingenious, which I will not ruin, but which involves the two protagonists discussing the film-maker himself, with richly ironic asides about the film in which they are the stars.
