“This month, too, the debt increases.” The smell of money lingers throughout Alice Rohrwacher’s Happy as Lazzaro. A community of labourers: men, women, children alike; spend their days tending to the land of a tobacco farm in an undisturbed corner of the Italian countryside. As sharecroppers, an outlawed practice that they believe to be the norm, they are not paid, instead given a share of the crop to trade with; as long as the workers remain financially indebted to their landlord, they can be exploited and forced to work the land. Among these farmers is Lazzaro, a wide-eyed, kind-hearted and serene young man whose good nature is easily and regularly taken advantage of. He makes the landlord’s son a cup of coffee and the two seem to become friends, but, when asked why he stopped working to do so, Lazzaro enthusiastically replies: “you ordered me to.” Rohrwacher’s film lives within this dynamic between oppressed and oppressor. The power of money corrupts every relationship the isolated community has with the outside world, and when their lives are suddenly upended, these farmers are thrown into a poisonous modern society and forced to adapt to its rules. Time passes: a new currency, a new season; but the rich still exploit the poor. Lazzaro sees unemployed men and women, most with their families, most of them migrant workers, walk to a secluded industrial site in the dead of morning to bid against each other for a day’s work; out of desperation, the people willing to work for the lowest rate get the job. By placing the ever-youthful Lazzaro at the heart of two communities struggling to survive, both a bucolic farm corrupted by capitalism and a city ravaged and consumed by it, Rohrwacher connects a scandal of the past with the myriad atrocities occurring in plain sight today; Lazzaro, the ageless observer, echoes a history that never went away. Life goes on.
A similar, if not entirely comparable figure illuminates Lila Avilés’ The Chambermaid, which follows a 24 year old single mother, Eve, as she works long days cleaning the rooms of a luxury hotel in Mexico City. A determined and efficient woman, Eve is hoping for a promotion that would allow her both more money and more time with her young son, who she barely sees — but she’s not the only person who wants the job. Avilés takes a directly observational approach to documenting Eve’s work, choosing long takes and fixed wide-shots to emphasise the care she takes over her duties, and the time she spends doing so. The rooms she cleans, designed for transience, become a second home to her, or at least the ghost of a home: all off-whites and dull-greys, with the occasional painting on the wall doing little to add colour. The large windows of each room offer a panoramic view of a city skyline behind glass, always outside, always distant. Her uniform is charcoal grey, and she wears a hairnet on duty; no evidence of her presence can be left in these rooms. She’s cagey and distant from her fellow workers, as they all seem to be to each other, and every conversation she has boils down to some kind of transaction. Hotel guests curtly demand more towels or toiletries, while colleagues militaristically bark information over walkie-talkies (“copy that”) or make small talk before asking for help with a shift; one colleague’s initial kindness towards Eve is ultimately revealed as a sales pitch for moisturiser and tupperware. Avilés’ camera never leaves the hotel, and while this 42-floored hotel is too big to ever feel claustrophobic, it’s hard to shake the idea that there are more important things going on elsewhere. As such, Avilés’ focus on the micro, one woman’s means to an end, creates an impression of the macro. Fleeting moments reveal the ways in which people take necessary shortcuts to reach their goals, and Eve’s day-to-day struggles show how easy it is to be rendered invisible in a hierarchy built on pitting workers against one another.