Araby

ARABY   **1/2

João Dumans and Affonso Uchoa

2017

IDEA:  Through his diary, peripatetic laborer Cristiano tells of his arduous life on the road.

BLURB:  As an elegiac ode to the invisible, exploited lives of migrant laborers, Araby is considerably affecting. Its first-person perspective gives valuable interiority to one such worker, elevating his status beyond the marginalized position capitalist society assigns him. Here he tells his own story, and we see how the effects of itinerancy, impersonal industrial labor, and a system designed to keep one disenfranchised gradually wear away a person’s sense of purpose and possibility. The film is smart in how it addresses these socioeconomic conditions without sensationalism, honoring Cristiano simply by devoting ordinary attention to his life and work, using a journal to give us access to thoughts and feelings that would otherwise go unexpressed. But Araby’s unadorned straightforwardness is also limiting. Outside of its oblique first act, the film’s narrative approach is largely prosaic, favoring expository voice-over and a rigid, this-then-this recounting of events. There is a flatness to this narration that is reinforced by the visuals, which seldom rise above the level of functional. Perhaps that’s right for the story of a regular working-class man, one whose life hardly needs frills to be worth telling. Still, there’s the nagging feeling that the idea of Araby is more praiseworthy than its actual execution; only at its lyrical, plaintive coda do the two achieve true synthesis.