Is not it a great idea? Living underground, in the space that would be occupied by a vehicle that is no longer used. If cars disappeared, how much wasted space that could be turned into wonderful single-person homes! What’s the problem? Housing is the central theme of the Norwegian film ‘Arkitekten’, available on Filmin, the Catalan platform that also celebrates its Atlàntida Film Fest these days in style, in Mallorca. Recently, former President Zapatero said in an interview that during his term the biggest structural problems in Spain were employment and housing, and then everything else. And that today, the same. The house has a thousand facets and this series tries to identify them and turn them around as best it can.
For starters, we live somewhere in the near future, where everything is sinister but resonates with life today: voice assistants maintain that haunting HAL-9000 vibe, delivery drones replace a visit from your mother, and we interact with answering machines. automatic when we call the bank —the violence of this sequence in the series, the first, is brutal. The favorable granting of a mortgage is a dream and the one who manages to pay the down payment on a mini-apartment is perhaps thanks to the fact that he has received compensation because he has been violently robbed. There are even people who have started living illegally in garage spaces separated by curtains.
One of those who opts for this solution is Julie, who is going through all these problems, but on top of that she works as an intern in an architecture studio. One project could get her out of poverty: she’ll invent some way to build thousands of new homes in the crowded center of the city. A new law allows building houses without windows and the solution will be in the garage: “it doesn’t cost anything, the foundations are already made, and better without windows, since glass is very expensive” (by the way, the developers that appear are very magnificent and nothing “vultures”). Unexpectedly, Julie makes a friend on the other side of the curtain, in the adjacent garage space. Her name is Kaja, and it turns out that she is also an activist against urban barriers: with her radio she goes around the city slicing up thoughtful decorations, for example, so that no one sits down or a homeless person cannot sleep, something that we all see appear undisguisedly. in the ornamental elements of our cities. The relationship between the two, Julie and Kaja, seems to want to tell us something positive about contact between neighbors. We would be forced to understand each other if we all lived a curtain away and, perhaps, one in a million, we would find the most beautiful of friendships. There has to be something more than contact.
The series is very short —not even 80 minutes— and so minimalist that there is barely room to go into too many complexities. Beyond the visual and geometric beauty of the places, the characters can be counted on the fingers of one hand and everything seems a bit forced. The plot of the activist enters with a shoehorn, wanting to touch more sticks of the right to the city, as the academic Henri Lefebvre called it and David Harvey has dedicated his entire life to studying. Thus, in a short time, the right to public and private space is mixed, an interesting combination that would require more time. There is a very good moment in which Julie waits for her mother in a square, and a woman appears who reminds her that if she spends more than five minutes there, she is obliged to consume —the worker goes with a backpack-coffee maker on her back— . This is by no means crazy about the series, it is simply a slight exaggeration of the palpable trend towards the privatization of public spaces and the relentless drive towards hardly any leisure without spending in our societies. We see the same with face-to-face attention in the bank: there are already those who propose to collect it, just like in the series.
Only another couple of characters are explored, very grotesque, which are supposed to be the note of existentialist Nordic humor – in my case, laughter has not worked, nor has the “microwave rap” scene. Between the four of them, they generate a landscape that is too schematic for a very complex reality. More than real people, they seem like archetypes of moral options in the face of problems (activism at one extreme, insurance scam at another), which adds an air of strangeness to everything, encapsulated in the character of Julie. She also has an Asperger aura that reinforces this dystopian reverie.
This distance means that we don’t empathize with anyone —it’s not that it has to be that way—, but personally I would give the series an adjective: insufficient. It may be because I was expecting proposals or solutions, and here there are none —and it didn’t have to be that way either, error of expectations. It is tremendously negative and hopeless, so it is up to the viewer to wonder what to do to avoid moving towards that portrayed site, how to favor other things, what does a home mean and why should it have light and more than ten square meters, how do we do it if everyone we want to live in the same place… proposals, answers, which we will have to find elsewhere.
#garage #space #move #Architect #Filmin