Beautiful Things

(Giorgio Ferrero & Federico Biasin, Italy, 2017)

A poetic documentary portrait, with hyper-stylised imagery and sound design, of four men who work in complete isolation and silence.

Van tends Texan oil pumpjacks. Danilo minds a huge cargo ship. Andrea works in an echo-less product-testing chamber. And Vito manages a waste-to-energy burning plant.

This group is contrasted with a modern couple who are typical, heedless consumers of toys, gadgets and fads.

It has become a trend in contemporary documentary and essayistic cinema to inquire into the strange life-cycle of consumerist objects. This is especially so at a time when cultural philosophy has turned its attention to the concept of the anthropocene: the measurable time-span of human impact on the earth’s natural systems. It’s an epoch that may be approaching its apocalyptic end.

Building audiovisual motifs that gradually interweave the daily sensations and musings of the four lonely men, Giorgio Ferrero and his cinematographer-collaborator Fernando Biasin eventually draws a much wider, global picture: a strange, disquieting, almost perverse world economy of production, exhaustion, destruction and waste.

This cycle begins over and over again, without reason or vision beyond immediate, ephemeral gratification.

Beautiful Things looks for the unexpected traces of soulfulness inside such an infernal, churning machine.

© Adrian Martin September 2018