If a movie gets a 100 out of 100, I'll give it a 500. That's not to say it's great on a cinematic level, but it's a representation of real life that I thought was extinct on the screen.
A month ago, I wrote "Those really hard problems that almost don't exist on today's screen", but my vision is too narrow, I don't know that there are people like Ken Loach in the UK who have been paying attention to reality , a director who has spent his entire life filming grassroots mass life.
Ricky, a middle-aged man, has been working on the construction site for half his life. He has worked in various types of work. Obviously, he has encountered a wave of unemployment. He applied for a job as a deliveryman in a courier company. His wife, Abby, works 14 hours a day in home care for the elderly. They have a son in high school and a daughter in elementary school.
Ricky is a man of self-respect, and he refuses to live on welfare and to be a man who doesn't pay for what he gets. When he interviewed for the courier company, the boss Maroney said was very attractive: You are not hired, we are collaborators.
To be a delivery man, you need a delivery van. After careful comparison, it is cheaper to buy a monthly loan by yourself than to rent a car from a courier company. In order to pay the down payment for the delivery van, the couple sold their wife's car, which is undoubtedly The wife's commute time has greatly increased, and a family that is not well-off, want to make some changes, often can only tear down the east wall to make up the west wall.
The daughter is more sensible, and she can understand the difficulties of her parents when she falls in love with school. The eldest son was in a period of rebellion. He played truant, painted graffiti on the street with his best friends, and even stole things from the supermarket, adding a lot of chaos to the family. In the movie, the parents are patient enough, and they are still patiently persuading them most of the time.
His wife, Abby, is a responsible caregiver. However, working for a long time every day makes it more and more difficult for her to balance her family and life. Those elderly people who live alone often need her care after she gets off work. past. However, her overpayment did not bring her excess income, at least when she was late for the bus, it was difficult to get the employer's understanding.
Ricky, who is a deliveryman, has a strict delivery time limit for each order. After a few months, he is extremely tired, and there are consecutive problems within the family. Ricky goes to the boss, Marroni, and wants to take a week off. Of course, the boss is not allowed to leave, and then he said a paragraph of his reasons:
Everyone here thinks I'm the number one scumbag, everyone misunderstood me, I turned all the complaints, anger and resentment into energy and used it to make a shield here, we're the best courier station in the country, want to know why ? Because I make it (delivery scanners and timers that couriers carry with them) happy. Every household you go to, everyone you meet, who will really greet you? You fall asleep while driving, collide with a bus, they don't care, they only care about shipping, efficiency, and delivery. These are all entered in this device. This installation competes with other installations across the UK and also determines the contract, who lives and who dies. I want Apple, Amazon, Samsung, Zara to deliver to us, all for the driver and family. It looks like hell here, but it's actually a vault, and the shareholders should put up a bronze statue for me in the parking lot: scumbag, Maroney.
This business textbook-level speech is logically clear and watertight, and there is nothing to blame.
The couriers working at this courier station probably earn higher wages than the industry; the director, Maroney, also earns huge returns for shareholders, and he has made this courier station one of the best in the UK. The express station can win express contracts from many major international companies - it is excellent, it is profitable, it is efficient, and it looks like everything is great.
However, it has a hefty fine when you can't complete the task; when you can't deliver on time several times, it will not hesitate to replace you from the busier and more profitable line; when you damage or lose the delivery Up to £1,000 in damages when you use a scanner and timer; heavy fines every day when you really can't come to work...
Looking back at the business textbook-level reason, I finally understand its underlying logic:
You want a little bit of human rights, sorry, I have to respect the rights of capital first.
Looking back at the movie's rebellious settings for the eldest son Sebastian, it caused a lot of trouble for the parents. When I conflicted with his father, even I felt that I really wanted to beat this kid.
But on second thought, from another point of view, he is the only resister - at least the only "non-buyer". He mentioned his friend's brother, who graduated from university with a debt of £57,000 in student loans, but the only job he could find was working in a supermarket. The track itself is already narrow, and even if you reach the finish line, you are still 108,000 miles away from your dream place, so why do you think that you can be better or luckier than your friend's brother?
So he skipped school, and every day he found a few walls with a few buddies and spray-painted some graffiti that wasn't even radical. He went to the supermarket and stole a few cans of spray paint. He believed that what he stole was from a supermarket chain, not an individual store on the roadside. This loss was nothing to a chain supermarket.
In my opinion, he has done some illegal acts, but he is still a long way from the "bad boy" who fights and causes trouble everywhere. He harbored disapproval of the system and intended to resist. To a certain extent, he is refusing to become a "one-dimensional person" under what Marcuse calls the developed industrial society system, but all "resistance actions", to put it bluntly, only work within his own family - only Put more pressure on parents. It has no effect on the system itself.
As adults, his parents have been deeply embedded in the big social system, bearing the responsibility of nurturing the next generation, not only can't resist, they don't even have a thought. What is interesting is that in this strict system, in such an efficient and civilized system, when many bad situations occur, it can be said that no specific perpetrator can be found, but everyone may become victim.
This is "destroying man in man's name".
If the word "destroy" is too heavy in this day and age, it is at least "striking people in their name".
The courier in the UK will leave a note when the consignee is not at home, and the head will be "Sorry We Missed You". Using this sentence as the title of the movie is not a pun: movies and TV miss the grassroots people. It's been too long.
In the movie "Sorry, We Missed You", if you want to see the beauty, the exotic style, the ups and downs, and the counterattack, it has nothing. And I want to say to this movie: Sorry I Missed You.
This is a British movie in 2019. In the second half of 2020, many people in China read the article "Takeaway Rider, Trapped in the System". My own guess is that most of the people who will read this article carefully and actively share this article are not takeaway riders by profession, but everyone understands "being trapped in the system", too well.
I only have one overseas shopping experience myself, which happens to be in the United Kingdom. Amazon in the United Kingdom serves as a display platform. After placing an order, it is shipped by a third party and sent to the warehouse of an overseas forwarding point. The forwarding point will then send it to me from the United Kingdom.
This purchase is really really really slow. From the seller in the UK to the forwarding point, the whole UK is only big, and it took 3 or 4 days to deliver. The forwarding point will send it to me after receiving it. This action will take at least one week to complete...
I don't want to accuse the UK of being inefficient here, but our logistics system is much more efficient than theirs. So, under this "efficiency", how many couriers are more breathless than Ricky in the movie?
We don't see it, and we don't care.
It's exactly what the boss Maloney said in the movie: Every household you go to, everyone you meet, who will really greet you? You fall asleep while driving, collide with a bus, they don't care, they only care about shipping, efficiency, and delivery.
When a person puts on work clothes, he becomes a screw in a large system, and even is forgotten that he is a person. Or that he became a tool man - the accent is the tool, not the man.
Yet everything is efficient, civilized, and orderly.
View more about Sorry We Missed You reviews
