Yarden
Directed by:
Måns MånssonScreenplay:
Sara NamethCinematography:
Ita Zbroniec-ZajtCast:
Dennis Axnér, Robert Bengtsson, Veselko Bedi, Anders Mossling, Carina Nilsson de Rosa, Morten Burian, Alexandra Zetterberg, Gertrud Sandqvist, Hilal ShomanPlots(1)
Yarden is the name of a loading station for passenger cars in the port of Malmö. Hundreds of cars with uniform white protective covers are parked there in neat rows stretching as far as the eye can see. This is where a poet past his prime ends up after he catapults himself out of intellectual life via a suicide mission of sorts and becomes dependent on the job centre. His colleagues are migrants and distrust the new guy, the Swedish guy. The management never addresses anyone by name and informants receive bonuses. The poet becomes number 11811 and gradually loses everything in the forbidding reality of his new surroundings, even the respect of his son with whom he lives, separated from the mother.
A deliberately pared down filmic elegy, Yarden shows how a man slips into the cold, taciturn working environment of unbridled capitalism, in which the voice of Julio Iglesias wafts past like a perfidious greeting from another time. There are no guilty parties here, just those who know the rules of the game better. It's the others that sink down occasionally, below the surface of the sea.
(Berlinale)
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On the edge between an Östlund socio-probe and Darden's (anti) morality - the story of a bankrupt man who deliberately destroys his life, which brings him to the bottom of Swedish society - poorly paid foreign workers at a car depot in Malmö. Dehumanized work, dehumanized relationships, totally dehumanized form, dominated by distinctive frames, cold colors and an aggressively industrial sound component. A film that deals with a lack of empathy and does not try to evoke any, either with immigrants or with a protagonist who is far too passive and surrendered to receive any compassion. His decisions in the second half remind of Rosetta of Dardenne brothers, but the viewer is not offered any satisfaction, only a brutally torn and austere ending. The unfortunate thing is mainly the instructive use of opera overture in the background music and the sometimes somewhat debatable attempt to make the film a metaphor for Sweden, but the work is remarkable. [Forum Berlinale 2016]
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Photo © TriArt Film
