A factory worker joins with a group of anarchist watchmakers in this marvelously crisp drama.
At the center of every mechanical clock is a spiral — the unrest as it’s known in Switzerland — and it’s a smart metaphor for Cyril Schäublin’s marvelously crisp study of anarchist watchmakers in the 1870s Saint-Imier valley. These women and men are aggrieved by long hours, dehumanizing labor, high taxes, health insurance costs, voting disenfranchisement, income inequality, surging nationalism and the pressures of an increasingly global economy. All of this while being distracted by an emerging mass-produced technology — the photograph — which allows them to stare at pocket-size images of influential strangers (executed rebels, mostly) like ye olde social media. This emboldened era believes its teetering system will collapse. We know it won’t. Time, Schäublin implies, is quite literally circular.
The film punctures that airless sense of fate which can suffocate period pieces and restores this moment of upheaval to immediacy. Schäublin and the cinematographer Silvan Hillmann shoot scenes like a documentary. The camera lurks at a distance while the actors speak as casually as if they’re wearing hidden mics; the shot list could be transplanted as is to a fast fashion factory in present-day Bangladesh. Yet, to Schäublin, this story is more personal than his strictly anthropological movie lets on. His grandmother worked at a Swiss watch factory, and said her own grandmother had, too.
Outside the building, the real-life Russian anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin (Alexei Evstratov) tangles politely with a smiling, implacable gendarme (Laurent Ferrero). Inside, a few more characters emerge: the politically ambitious factory owner (Valentin Merz), a handful of female employees (Clara Gostynski, Monika Stalder, Laurence Bretignier) and a series of bloodless managers who loom over the ladies’ hunched bodies with a stopwatch timing their productivity. There’s a bitter irony in the realization that the workers are constructing their own doom. Now that seconds can be measured, every one of them counts.
Unrest
Not rated. In Swiss German, Russian, French and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
