Machines movie review & film summary (2017)
As its interviews continue, the film hears from people whose comments do touch on some issues that viewers are likely to wonder about. Unions, which might help replace 12-hour stints with an eight-hour day (a goal that most workers seem to fervently desire) are regularly thwarted by the owners, we’re told. Any time a union movement gains steam, its leaders are eventually identified and killed.
Later in the documentary, we see some of the people who buy and sell the fabrics the workers manufacture. With their sharp haircuts, nice clothes, aviator sunglasses and smartphones, they are a different order of being than those we’ve been observing, and they seem unthinkingly comfortable as they go about their business.
We also hear from one factory manager who’s the very picture of smug self-righteousness. He says he now pays his workers ten times what he did when he started out 12 years before, but he evidently finds them irresponsible and ungrateful. Only half of them, he says without offering proof, send money to their families. The rest fritter it away on tobacco and alcohol.
Another thing the press kit reveals that’s not in the movie: Filmmaker Rahul Jain grew up visiting a factory like this that was owned by his grandfather. When he went back to film, he knew some of the workers, and was given full access due to his connections.
The very best scene here—one that suggests the premise of a much better movie—comes very late, when there’s a crowd of workers facing the camera and, in effect, demanding to know what he’s going to do with the access he’s had. Is he going to do anything to help them?
If Jain had spoken to them, and incorporated his own memories and feelings about the subject into the doc rather than hiding behind the privilege of the auteur, “Machines” would be a much richer and more revealing film. But he keeps silent, leaving them to suspect that he’ll do no more good for them than the politicians who come through, offer empty promises, then retreat back into their privileged lives.
