My Darling Supermarket
Working from the dual premise that everyone is a philosopher and every location can yield beauty, My Darling Supermarket introduces six staff members of a Brazilian supermarket and gradually reveals their inner lives while they bake bread, scan for shoplifters, and restock shelves. Meanwhile, the curious camera of director and co-editor Tali Yankelevich wanders the aisles and backrooms, searching out patterns, symmetry, and incongruities (a butterfly is a repeated motif).
As forklift driver Santo says early on, it’s just “ordinary people doing their jobs. Who would want to watch that?” Yet Yakelevich turns the Walmart-size Supermercado Veran into a kind of space capsule, floating through an unseen world outside, its crew utilizing their mundane, endlessly repeated tasks to contemplate meaning, love, and destiny.
The documentary ignores banalities such as pay grades, overtime, food waste, and advancement opportunities — except perhaps in the case of high-strung cashier Danilo, who describes a past nervous breakdown on the job that he sees as a moment of enlightenment. (He also likes to cruise the customers.) This isn’t a movie about social structures or labor conditions, but about the inner life of the people we see every day without giving them a second thought.
There’s gregarious Rodrigo, a voracious reader who discusses George Orwell’s 1984 while counting out fresh rolls for the customers. Attentive, self-reflective Solineide, who assesses why she’s ideally suited to monitoring the store’s security system. And skillful young baker Ivan, who has retreated from relationships in favor of the superhero stories in which he finds reassurance.
My Darling Supermarket is unlike any documentary you’ve seen before, with a visual sense that strives for Koyaanisqatsi and moments of serenity and exhaustion blended into something akin to either Zen or Kafka, depending on your point of view. It’s full of clever visual juxtapositions, such as cutting from one worker’s contemplation of life after death to a shot of stale bread being turned into useful bread crumbs.
Of all films, perhaps the closest comparison is the bathroom scene from The Shining. Like Grady, the eternal caretaker at the Overlook Hotel, these staffers seem woven into their workplace, locked into an eternal present — minus the homicidal imperative.
Conjuring such a sense of stasis, of course, means that My Darling Supermarket has little narrative drive. Once its key players have had their say, the lights go out and the store closes, presumably to open up again a few hours later and repeat everything exactly as before.
Grade: B. Not rated but PG equivalent. Now available for rental via grailmoviehouse.com.
(Photo: Noise Film)
