★★☆☆☆
An initially gripping parable about workers’ rights in a Portuguese lift factory gradually becomes a harrowing endurance test in this three-hour epic of earnest social realism from the documentary-maker Pedro Pinho, making his fiction debut.
Like Ken Loach’s Bread and Roses dragged out to infinity, it’s rooted in a Lisbon factory, where angry workers (played by non-professional actors — always a stretch) have halted a hasty corporate sell-off and occupied the factory floor. They spend the rest of the movie discussing the relationship between slavery and capitalism, the marginalisation of the underclass and Europe’s economic decline.
It’s delivered, unsurprisingly, with shaky-cam realism and it’s hard work. A brief musical interlude at the 2:20 mark (the workers do a ramshackle number, on the floor, Gene Kelly style) is a zany distraction, but not half as charming as it thinks, and certainly not sufficient compensation for staying the course.
15, 179min