Subscription 790/year or 190/quarter

The paradox of liberalism

Delicate Balance.
Regissør: Frágil Equilibrio 
()

With Uruguay's former president as commentator, Delicate Balance puts the increased inequality and the global power of the market in a wider context.




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

Do we buy things just to make up for our numb lives and lack of close relationships? And how much do we control this buying pleasure ourselves? We can't do it alone. This is what the market knows to bet on. And few can stop it.

With his documentary debut Delicate Balance director Guillermo García López has used a "talking head": José Alberto Mujica was Uruguay's president from 2010 to 2015, and represented the socialist party Frente Amplio ("The Wide Front"). He is known for his eccentric nature, his Spartan lifestyle – which he might expect during his 14 year-long stay in isolation after being guerrilla wars – and quotes as "Poor people are the ones just working to keep an expensive lifestyle" and always want more and more ». He has enough to defer to what he thinks is an inhuman world policy.

Three stories. Mujica's ideas about modern society, where economic interests come before human values ​​and where the market decides, are the film's thematic red thread. It ties together three alternating depictions from three different world continents:

In Madrid, a brutal reality is portrayed when an army of ruthless police forces throw ordinary people into the streets and render them homeless. These are people who have fallen into the debt chase created by financiers who have followed the same recipe that the mortgage sharks used in the States and which caused the housing market to collapse in 2008. Several North American banks have also participated in this so-called business. But while the Spaniards are driven out into the streets, the banks are bought out of debt.

At the same time, in Mount Gurugú, Morocco, a man is fastening bolts under the soles of his shoes, hoping to make the big leap the next time he and his fellow refugees try to run free. They are all young men from African countries, several with high education. They have lived in the woods for ten months from the European border for several months. "There's no peace here," one says. So close, yet so distant. But on the other side of the Spanish enclave, they do not know what is in store for them.

At the same time, in Japan's Tokyo, we meet two well-educated men in suits who can buy what they want, but who do not seem to be completely proud of their material wealth: They have no time to spend this money, and work so much so that everything goes on autopilot. Robot life has made them emotionally isolated and alienated, and "spark of life" is probably a foreign word.

It is the poorest who put the most kids into the world. To reproduce is their revenge.

Global problem. The various testimonies in Delicate Balance contributes to the complex and detailed description of a problem that has become global. At a time when the market sets the terms – where the market crosses national borders, forces nations closer together and inequality increases – it may be time to think differently about world politics. Are country borders outdated?

In parallel with a voice-over, we study stylized images of different people on their way to and from something, filmed from different city centers in slow motion. Maybe it's an expression of a desire to slow down time? At least a lot seems to have gone too fast in the process of making the world move forward. Economists are arguing about economic growth. Capitalism has given us a lot of knowledge, resources and opportunities. But if you want to get the poorest to join the buying party, it requires that you invest in them. Still, there is too much greed and selfishness in the world, Mujica believes. Therefore, one wants immediate profit. It is at the expense of the lowest class.

We have succeeded in organizing a global civilization as aggressive in creating customers, who concentrate power everywhere but at the same time divide the majority. The world's biggest problem is the lack of proper governance of it, is the former president's conclusion. Because we have the resources and the knowledge, but totally lack the direction. And when the majority are so poor that they starve, we have a big problem: Who wants to think about society's politics when you just have to focus on survival? At the same time, as Mujica and many before him point out, it is the poorest who give birth to the most children. To reproduce is their revenge.

In Morocco, a man fastens screws under the soles of his cloth shoes, hoping to make the big leap better the next time he and his fellow refugees try to run free.

The democracy that broke. Our democracy has broken its promises of equality and justice. For who really controls the way we live? The market brings with it progressiveness and modernity, but also the intense slavery, represented by market dependence and the permanent incentive to buy and buy, says Mujica. His solution is that the world should be without borders, with clear, common global rules to be able to meet on the same terms, as well as to revise trading methods.

We have previously in both fiction films and documentaries been presented with similar arguments about the world's increased inequality: The baton is taken further from the Robert Reich documentary Inequality For All (Kornbluth, 2013). Men Delicate Balance has no statistics or source-heavy factual information to refer to, and in addition to leaning on Mujica's charisma and sharp tongue, it rather enters the human plane. It is played on closeness and one relies on Cases, on personal empiricism. Here, the individual stories are generalizing to what more people are experiencing in the world today. The statements and visual depictions can only be taken for what they are – as a supporting argument for facts we already know: These are the consequences of the world's growing differences, where consumer power has become stronger than anything else. A power that trumps all culture.

Here, too, there are no contradictions to what is being said, and it is played more on empathy than on the facts about the people we follow – for better or worse. Where is the Delicate Balance? Documentaries can be dystopian, at the same time we live in a time where we need encouragement and reasons to live. The question is whether that was Lopez's intention with the debut.

Willemien W. Sanders
Willemien W. Sanders
Sanders is a critic, living in Rotterdam.

You may also like