via The Hollywood Reporter
by Jordan Mintzer

It’s hard to think of a better title than the one writer-director Cyril Schäublin came up with for his second feature, which chronicles the political fervor swelling beneath the surface of a quiet, picturesque industrial town in late-19th century Switzerland.

That town, nestled cozily beside the Jura Mountains, is home to a factory where workers meticulously assemble watches by hand, setting the tiny balance wheel, known as an unrueh (unrest), with the type of scientific precision that the Swiss are famous for. But the real unrest is happening all around them, as the burgeoning anarchist movement takes hold of the factory as well as the community, pitting the workers — almost all of them women — against the powers-that-be who run everything like clockwork, reducing humans to mere cogs in the wheel of the capitalist machine.

Venue: New York Film Festival (Main Slate)
Cast: Clara Gostynski, Alexei Evstratov, Monike Stadler, Hélio Thiémard, Alice-Marie Humbert
Director, screenwriter: Cyril Schäublin
1 hour 33 minutes

The film occasionally shifts its focus onto two of the townspeople caught up in the struggle — the young watch assembler Josephine (Clara Gostynski) and the real-life Russian anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin (Alexei Evstratov) — but their story is only part of a larger one depicting Western Europe on the brink of transformation, with seeds being firmly planted for the labor and feminist movements that would explode during the next century.

Unrest is therefore a political film, as well as an historical one. But it’s also discreet and thus, extremely Swiss, with none of the fiery rhetoric of classic leftist dramas like Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 or Warren Beatty’s Reds. Schäublin draws more inspiration from Robert Bresson, casting non-professional actors and keeping passions subdued, while only hinting at a possible romance between Pyotr and Josephine. He also bears the influence of the French directing duo Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, who used Brechtian distancing techniques to convey their socialist narratives, with characters reciting texts rather than saying their lines.

While the drama never exactly ignites, Schäublin keeps us constantly fascinated with his detailed historical recreations and keen observations on science, manufacturing and technology, and how they weighed upon the souls of workers and owners alike. In the factory, Josephine and her fellow watchmakers are not only on the clock all day long, but their every gesture is measured down to the exact second, in a drive for industrial efficiency that, decades later, would come to be known as Fordism. The town itself is on the clock as well — actually several different clocks bearing different time signatures, with a telegraph message providing the precise time on the hour.

How human beings fit into this equation seems to be the major question posed by the anarchists, who have invented a form of collective action and mutual dependence that allows them to strive for universal workers’ rights while preserving a strong sense of community. Pyotr, who first appears on the factory doorstep as a visiting cartographer, is in reality a key ambassador of the Russian anarchist movement — he would famously pen several tracts and books in the decades that followed — and the map he’s drawing up is not an ordinary one, but rather a detailed chart of anarchy in the region.

It’s as if the town and Switzerland itself were in the midst of a seismic political shift, and Schäublin reveals how the ruling class is doing all it can to maintain the status quo. While the anarchists try to turn the tools of the capitalists against them, using telegrams to spread the word and photographs as an early form of agit-prop, the managers and elected officials — all of them men, of course — employ the rather friendly local police force, as well as other means, to keep the revolution in check.

Much of the political turmoil is either unseen or unspoken, or else spoken in a soft voice. There are no major battles in Unrest, no workers beating their ploughshares back into swords to fight the power. Like the watches that Josephine and the other women piece together in the factory, setting microscopic pins in place to get the mechanism running, the political upheavals here are being carefully assembled for the future.

Schaüblin’s filmmaking is at the same careful remove as his storytelling: Characters are typically framed off-center or in the background by cinematographer Silvan Hillmann, to the point that it’s sometimes hard to tell who the real protagonists are. The director used similar methods in his 2017 début, Those Who Are Fine, which tackled contemporary malaise in a Switzerland of stifling call centers and the criminally neglected elderly, using a distanced approach to convey the alienation of modern life.

Even if it’s aesthetically similar, Unrest is certainly the more hopeful of the two movies, set in a past where a better world, and perhaps a good love story, are still possible. It’s less interested in political grandstanding than in depicting how politics are lived on a quotidian basis — and how, in today’s parlance, the microaggressions one suffers on the job can gradually snowball into revolt. Like the photographs of Pytor, Josephine and other locals that are guarded by the townspeople as precious keepsakes, the film is a work of carefully realized group portraiture, freezing one moment in time amid the winds of change.

Full credits

Venue: New York Film Festival (Main Slate)
Production company: Seeland Filmproduktion
Cast: Clara Gostynski, Alexei Evstratov, Monike Stadler, Hélio Thiémard, Alice-Marie Humbert
Director, screenwriter, editor: Cyril Schäublin
Producers: Linda Vogel, Michela Pini
Director of photography: Silvan Hillmann
Production designer: Sara B. Weingart
Costume designer: Linda Harper
Casting directors: Rhea Plangg, Io Baur
Sales: Alpha Violet
In French, Swiss-German, Russian
1 hour 33 minutes

Add new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.

Filtered HTML

  • Web page addresses and email addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a href hreflang> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul type> <ol start type> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
CAPTCHA
Y
u
s
y
g
s
Q
D
Enter the code without spaces.
This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.