Director Denis Côté
JOY OF MAN’S DESIRING (Que ta joie demeure) B-
Canada (70 mi) 2014 d: Denis
Côté official
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The work place is the
place where those arriving cross paths with those who are leaving early. —Georges Courteline, (June 25, 1858 – June 25, 1929)
Denis Côté remains something of a radical, underground Québécois
filmmaker championing the unfamiliar, including small and unconventional films,
where his most recent film Vic +
Flo Saw a Bear (2013) is perhaps his
most accessible, through it remains provocatively disturbing, while this is
closer to his earlier work Bestiaire
(2012), a wordless and minimalist film essay shooting animals living in the
closed quarters of an amusement park, observing human behavior through the
unpretentious eyes of animals, and vice versa, both seemingly on equal footing. Côté is himself a former film critic from
Montreal, and what he brings to his films is a certain objective detachment,
where the key is observing without judgment.
While this is a free associative and contemplative work that focuses
upon the routine aspects of industrial work, accentuating machine operators in nine
small factories in Montreal, he establishes a precise rhythm of noise and
machine, where humans are simply intermediaries, but slowly introduces a
fictional element that finalizes the film.
While it may be completely unpretentious, it is quite different from the
meticulously austere group of Austrian documentarians, Nikolaus Geyrhalter, OUR DAILY BREAD (2005), Michael
Glawogger, WORKINGMAN’S DEATH (2005), SLUMMING (2006), and Whore's
Glory (2012), Ruth Mader, STRUGGLE (2003), and Hubert
Sauper, DARWIN’S NIGHTMARE (2004), which have a near mathematical precision
to them. Instead it remains open ended
and ambiguous, where the director intentionally makes no social comment, but
simply shows various stages of people at work, including moments of absurdity
when a union official, from an apparent approved distance where he is allowed
to stand, yells slogans at the workers while they are working.
Initially viewers are greeted by the pounding rhythm of a
machine press, including a montage of machines in close-up, while also
subjected to a curious opening monologue asking for support, where the audience
never sees who the comments are directed to, another worker or a machine (the
director?). This schism between man and
machine has been the subject of much conjecture since the advent of the
industrial age, where the interplay has not always been compatible. As we hear the workers talk to one another,
we discover one machine operates at a level of speed that most find dangerous,
but that’s what attracts one particular worker to that machine, preferring it
to all others, where he is able to utilize his own dexterity to achieve maximum
results. Another grows disillusioned
with the job, losing interest altogether, where he’s sitting around in a state
of depression when he’s approached by a person that could easily be a ghost of
the worker’s past, where another worker claims they’re ready to take his place,
asking if he’s ready to relinquish his job.
This visual sequence may simply be a passing thought in the course of
the working day. While workers are
routinely seen at their work stations, the presence of the camera in such close
proximity would seem to be a distraction and highly intrusive, perhaps
dangerously so, due to the precise nature of this kind of skilled work where
machines are manipulated into exact positions, where the degree for error is
minimal. Certainly one thought about
what we see is that we never see the final result of their labor, but only the
one piece of the puzzle that each worker is assigned to perform, creating a
feeling of incompleteness, as while they are part of the whole, they never seem
to be connected to the finished product.
For the filmmaker, he entered into this project without any
written script, becoming an improvisational journey that reveals itself over
time, an experimental alternative where we are taken on an observational tour
of various factory settings—metal working, carpentry, industrial laundry, a
garment shop, mattress factory, and coffee roasting. Alternating between people and machines as
well as the raw materials that surround them, many toil in a kind of solitary
silence, while others remain talkative and gregarious throughout with other
staff. Côté catches many of them during
their idle rest periods having a quick smoke, but also having extended
conversations about their jobs, providing shop talk, including an amusing
parable about a crooked employer, or comments about work fulfillment, where one
changed workplaces as she was barely noticed at her previous job and felt
invisible, but remains just as invisible here as well, offering views of alienation
and a sense of demoralization, as they spend half their lives in this
claustrophobic environment, while others find a kind of mystical satisfaction
in the constant repetitiveness of their actions, as if it offers the
opportunity to cleanse the mind. This
kind of emptyheaded blankness balances with the focused concentration needed
for the more intricate nature of some of the work performed, supplemented by an
intriguing sound design by Frédéric Cloutier and Clovis Gouaillier. By introducing fictional characters, some
seen offering prayers to their machines, Côté accentuates the kinds of thoughts
that might come into play, while also introducing other significant images,
where a partially constructed wooden piano is seen at one point, which later
introduces the titular Bach chorale Myra
Hess plays Bach/Hess "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" YouTube (3:41)
heard somewhere off in the distance to the worker’s contemplative thoughts,
where this musical reverie is perhaps the idealized sound of their completed
work, a kind of sacred musical construction of perfection. What is perhaps missing is the feeling of any
joy in the work, amusingly remedied in the final shot. Despite the multiple layers in play, the
narrow scope never becomes particularly revelatory, where it doesn’t impress as
much as some of the other work by this director.
