My Darling Supermarket (2019 | Brazil/Denmark | 90 minutes | Tali Yankelevich)
Even before the pandemic hit the world like a freight train, front-line workers in supermarkets, gas stations, and fast food restaurants were under-appreciated and grossly underpaid. That doesn’t mean that they were undereducated or mindless automatons simply doing their job ad nauseam just to get a paycheck. Meaningful questions, desires and aspirations dwell within all temples of commerce and the Supermercado Veran in Sao Paolo, Brazil is no exception, which is where this story takes place.
The concept of this documentary is reminiscent of the floating plastic bag a la American Beauty or the hidden genius in Good Will Hunting; the pursuit of a hidden gem amidst the mundane, but more often than not there is no gem, just real life and the people who live it. That being said, the “characters” in My Darling Supermarket have no problem with sharing their deep thoughts, personal demons and joy for the banal.
Take the baker who not only enjoys talking about, but has a great grasp of Newtonian physics waxing poetic about atoms splitting and re-merging. Or take the single mom who loves watching a dozen-plus security monitors for hours on end to catch the “bad guys” when they try to steal from her employer. Or maybe the checker who celebrates the uniqueness of every work day instead of complaining about prosaic nature of his job, flirts with customers, and laments his lack of long-term relationships.
In any large store there will be a whole community of interesting, and maybe not-so-interesting, stories behind the people who spend their lives there. Director Tali Yankelevich finds inspiration in every bit of it and does a decent job of bringing that story to her audience. There a few parts that felt contrived (like the occasional close up of a butterfly who had infiltrated the warehouse) but mostly she turned a chore like going to the supermarket into an exploration of humanity.
Especially now, we can all appreciate the excitement of what once seemed so annoyingly tedious.
Available starting 2/24/21 via virtual cinema in select cities.