I have seen boring movies and been bored. I have seen boring movies and been moved. I have seen boring movies and convinced myself I enjoyed them. Sometimes artistic ambition makes you eat your vegetables to earn that moment of beauty or insight. Now playing at the Red Sea Festival, Under The Fig Trees from French Tunisian director Erige Sehiri gives us one day of agricultural labour picking figs off of high branches. The cast are all great and fully inhabit the lives of their characters working under a shitty boss. They are old and young, men and women. Some are family. Some haven’t seen each other for years. Some are working their way through complicated romantic relationships. Some can only remember their loves from their past. Unfortunately, all are pretty boring.
Maybe if this were a documentary, the attempt at reality would pierce through the tedium. Sure it’s boring, but at least it’s real. My life is dull but it still interests me. Fake things are allowed to be fun.
The youngish boss picks up the workers early in the morning and packs them into the back of his pickup truck. One worker withstands the rumours to sit up front with him. Why does she receive special treatment? The rest of the movie takes place just like the title says, under the fig trees of the boss’s farm.
They get to work. We get monotonous glimpses into their lives. What broke through the monotony for me was learning through a new worker’s eyes how to shake a fig off a branch and how bad it is to break a branch. I enjoyed seeing the food the workers brought from home for their lunch break. Seeing pasta billowing out of a sealed tupperware was a reprieve from my eyes glazing over.
A young man talks about carving a girl’s initials into his arm with a compass. That might have been interesting to see and not just hear about. Another young man enlists the help of a romantic interest to hide a basket of figs under some leaves. I applaud stealing from the people who pay you very little but nothing really comes of this part of the story. We find out at the end they’re making about 60 Tunisian dinars ($25 Canadian) for seven days of labour.
It’s a testament to the actors and the naturalistic setting that I wanted to care about their lives. The likeable characters are all extremely likeable. Their desires and obstacles are sketched out clearly enough. They fight, they laugh, they work together to hide broken branches from the boss. But the biographical details, the glimpses into their lives, feel piled together like the figs they pack away into crates. Shipped off to be consumed somewhere else, where the interesting things actually happen. In the sea of repetitiveness, the slicing open of a fig became a legitimately exciting and visually interesting moment.
Near the end of the working day and the film, one of the young women goes into the trees to take a pee. The boss stalks and grabs her. He holds her against his body. She manages to get away but still has to work for him and get paid by him. Very much like in real life, this will go unreported and unpunished. This scene and a verbal argument between two of the young women workers are probably the most that happen.
At the end of the day, the characters walk up to the boss one by one to collect their pay. He counts and shells out the cash. What have they earned? What have I earned for watching this long? There’s tension as he pays the woman he assaulted. There’s tension as he pays the man who planned to steal figs. Even just the colour of the bills he slaps down are like water in the desert. They pack back into the flatbed of the truck to be driven back to their homes. They are so happy and so am I. One of the greatest joys in the world is leaving work.
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