Final Rating: 2.5/5
A cleaning service manager in charge of crews at several worksites is putting out fires, dealing with disillusioned workers and unsatisfied clients, and bending rules to get the job done in a cinema verite-study of low-wage work.
In I Understand Your Displeasure, Sabine Thalau plays Heike, a manager whose company in Germany isn’t making money, and whose interest in the lives of her mostly immigrant workforces ends at their usefulness to her. The film, from director Kilian Armando Friedrich, contains plenty of salient commentary on low-wage work, but is hampered by an unsympathetic, disconnected protagonist.
From the outset, Heike is dealing with problems: her workers at the school would rather celebrate their colleague becoming a father than mop the gym; one of her workers has problems with the physical demands of cleaning; a local kindergarten regularly complains about her team leaving streaks. Heike responds to all of these in turn. She confronts each of her disillusioned workers, her unsatisfied clients, offers to do the cleaning herself where possible, and dilutes cleaning supplies to save money. Few of these behaviours address the problems she faces effectively, and most simply make her a less sympathetic boss to her subordinates.
At no point does the audience learn exactly where her workers are from, because Heike does not care. Heike unthinkingly throws one of her workers fearing deportation under the bus simply because she needs to cut costs. At several points, Heike redirects conversations from concerns about nationality and asylum to direct concerns about budgets and contracts.
The most effective point made by Displeasure is that the current state of the job market – perhaps the entire economy – in Germany is such that even employers are struggling and just don’t have time to consider the humans under their employ. Indeed, the characters around Heike are varied with interests, skills, and whole backstories, but are flattened by Heike to Euros in a calculation. Given the choice between standing up for her workers or cutting a few bucks from her budget, Heike doesn’t take long to choose the second option.
Where Displeasure fails in that commentary is in depicting the other side. The few times that victims of Heike’s cost-cutting are shown are effective. An Eastern European man is forced to move back home, abandoning his dream of a better life for the sake of his family; a young woman is moved to start a union after being repeatedly failed by her boss. That said, those examples are used mostly to show how Heike’s approach fails.
When Heike, after developing a third-act conscience, attempts to start a cleaning co-op, nobody is interested after how they’ve been treated. She’s advised by counselors not to even consider it, and when she insists, Heike finds no base of support. As Heike approaches the crowd of people she’s wronged, none of them want anything to do with her. Unfortunately as a result none of them have much more to do with the film.
I Understand Your Displeasure speaks to a real problem that low-wage work is both undercompensated and understaffed, but comes at its commentary from the wrong perspective: that of a mid-career woman inflicting damage on her peers, rather than that of the peers being damaged.
