Un automne à Great Yarmouth

This film is an unflinching masterpiece that ventures into the shadows of Britain's Brexit-era society, exposing the inhumane underbelly of the modern meat industry and its treatment of immigrant workers. At the film's emotional core is Beatriz Batarda's mesmerizing performance as Tânia, a woman navigating a murky existence between victimhood and complicity. Batarda commands the screen with a raw intensity, bringing complexity and humanity to a character torn between her dreams of escape and the dark realities she perpetuates. Her portrayal of Tânia is deeply layered, capturing vulnerability, resilience, and the moral ambiguities of survival with grace and ferocity.

The film's setting (a cold, industrial Great Yarmouth) mirrors the brutality of the turkey processing factories that employ waves of immigrant workers. Martins does not shy away from depicting the grotesque physicality of the work, juxtaposed with the workers' dehumanization. This exploitation, eerily echoing the systemic abuses of the transatlantic slave trade, strips laborers of dignity, reducing them to economic units in a relentless cycle of profit. In Tânia's predicament (married to an Englishman and running a labor hiring network) we see the echoes of history: how individuals can become both pawns and enablers in systems of oppression.

Martins' direction combines stark realism with nightmarish overtones, delivering a chilling exploration of modern servitude. The meat industry, as portrayed in this film, becomes a harrowing metaphor for unchecked greed, where lives are ground down as readily as the flesh being processed. Like slavery, this system thrives on the exploitation of society's most vulnerable, highlighting the moral decay that comes when human lives are commodified.

Great Yarmouth is not an easy watch, but it is an essential one. It confronts its audience with uncomfortable truths about the intersection of labor, migration, and humanity's capacity for cruelty. Anchored by Batarda's tour de force, the film stands as a stark reminder of the cost of ignoring the invisible workers who sustain industries far removed from public scrutiny. It forces us to ask: how much has truly changed since the darkest chapters of human history?

Marco Martins, in exploring the turkey meat factories in England, delivers a film that seems more interested in recreating a stereotypical fantasy of industrial exploitation than in presenting an authentic or relevant perspective. The pacing is a central issue: slow, almost paralyzing, the film drags itself through a narrative that tries too hard to appear poetic but quickly becomes tedious and predictable. The lack of dynamism turns what could have been a sharp analysis into an exhausting exercise in patience.

The actors, though talented in other contexts, deliver performances that cross the line into excessive theatricality. Beatriz Batarda and Nuno Lopes, frequent collaborators of Martins, cannot escape an overblown portrayal that verges on caricature, undermining any attempt to build empathy or credibility. The director's decision to continually work with the same cast feels more like a crutch than a deliberate artistic choice, reflecting a complacency that overlooks the vast pool of talent in Portuguese cinema. It's as if Martins' creative universe were a closed club where only the usual members are allowed, at the expense of freshness and innovation.

Furthermore, the premise already feels outdated. The reality of factories in Europe has changed drastically in recent decades, with strict regulations and quality controls that make the depiction of workers as mere slaves seem artificial and even sensationalist. Of course, there are stories to be told about labor conditions in contemporary capitalism, but Martins opts for an antiquated and simplistic lens, weakening any social relevance the film might have had.

In the end, what remains is a work that attempts to say something important but fails to captivate, move, or educate. For a film that aims to be a wake-up call or an artistic reflection, it ends up sounding like an exhausting and outdated monologue, delivered by someone unwilling to step outside their own creative bubble.

Strange sounding concept, a Portugese film about Great Yarmouth. It has some pretty gruesome scenes from the turkey factory early on, but stick with it because these are to set the scene around the type of work the immigrants are required to do. The film follows Tania's desparate attempts to build a better life for herself at the expense of the people coming over to work. It's hard to imagine how bad their lives in Portugal would need to be for this life to be considered the best option for any of the people involved. Interesting piece of work.

The Great Yarmouth setting adds a surreal element with the comparison between the ageing seaside resort and it's very mixed population.