Gear up for some fun times with three extraordinary men…who are just, ordinary. Director Neus Ballus brings us ‘The Odd-Job Men’, a Spanish quirky situational comedy combined with drama that executes a work of art of relatable characters put together to work with each other with very different personalities. The film has recently won an award at the Locarno Film Festival, for Best Actors of the two main leads, Mohamed Mellal & Valero Escolar.
‘The Odd-Job Men’ stars three handymen named Valero (Valero Escolar), Moha (Mohamed Mellal), and Pep (Pep Serra), who are all in fact, real life handymen. In the start of the film, we see Valero who is a middle-aged handyman that sets the tone of his character as a very opinionated know-it-all who often speaks what he thinks to his soon to be retiring handyman, Pep. His heavy dialogues contribute so well to his character that often times it feels genuinely improvised making his character a natural fit for him.
Enter Moha, a young, smart, fit, yet timid soft-spoken handyman from Morocco looking for an odd-job work. Moha meets Valero for the first time, telling him he was called in for an interview to join their team. The initial interactions between Moha and Valero were set up with immediate conflicts and clashes between the two trying to understand each other, which gives a bit of comedy on their first meet. For example, Moha’s still learning Spanish and says their company name, and Valero dismisses it saying it’s a different company. This simple exchange between the situation led to a long argument about the pronunciation of the name was such a small, but laughable issue. Something one would look back and say “remember that time we argued about such a silly pronunciation?”.
Pep is the older, wise handyman, who is in transition to retire for Moha as his replacement, is stuck in the middle trying to keep the tensions down between Val and Moha working together. Whenever they visit their odd-job clients in their home, Val would often speak loudly to his clients and berate Moha during his work, sometimes borderline racist, by spontaneously telling him things he is doing wrong. Moha tries to be patient with Val and focuses on his work. The funny thing is that clients take a liking to Moha because of his approachable demeanor. Val’s jealousy of Moha makes him feel like a threat to him and would downplay Moha’s repair efforts even though he is doing it right without complaining.
What makes this film interesting is the test of two generational relationships where one young hotshot is joining the workforce to work with a middle-aged jaded man that has been on the job two decades older. Valero, being the older man, is set in his ways working with Pep for so long, that he is resistant to change. Having worked in careers with a similar generation gap, I can truly relate to the struggles of trying to work with an experienced older person who refuses to adapt and dismiss anything a younger individual would do, even though the young person is willing to learn. Moha captured the essence of trying to fit in, and Valero is building roadblocks from letting Moha in. It may seem like a non-existent relationship, but there is a relationship in the field of their work. The communication between the two is non-existent.
The scenes are well structured in a one-week trial of Moha working with Valero, which is proven to work very well for men working in odd-jobs. This gives a lot of opportunity to set up scenes of doing repair jobs for diverse clients, which open up for some very unique interactions and how Valero and Moha communicate with their clients. The clients were mostly eccentric and entertaining, which help contrast the personalities of the two main leads in The Odd-Job Men.
The dialogue between characters in the film are heavy, and well worth the welcome as this is the meat and potatoes of the film. There are very minimal special effects and tons of great improvisation from Valero and Moha’s characters, which help maintain the pacing and intrigue of what was going to happen in the next day of their job.
Overall, director Neu Ballus has done an incredible job capturing the themes of generation gaps, communication, anxiety, and dysfunctional relationships, giving this melting pot of polar opposite characters many opportunities to shine on their performances for this film. The comedy is subtle and not over-the-top, and the situations characters are placed in are so relatable that one can walk away telling a story of some silly situation that happened at work, and laugh it off afterwards with a couple of drink buddies.