"In the Aisles" Thomas Stuber: German love tragicomedy in a supermarket

"In the Aisles" - a film by German director Thomas Stuber about the life and relationships of employees of a large shopping center in Germany. The protagonist is a loader who falls in love with a sweets salesperson. Behind the modest and cute love story of the “little people” in the picture of Stuber lies a social drama about the life of Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The best way to prepare for autumn melancholy is to watch the deceptively simple and undoubtedly charming German film “In the Aisles”. True, the action in it takes place in the cold season: the characters meet Christmas, and then they put on fur coats and almost kiss in the frost section of the shopping center, called by the employees of Siberia.

Made by Thomas Stuber, well known in Germany for television work, In the Aisles unexpectedly entered the Berlinale-2018 competition, where he won no prizes. President of the jury Tom Tykwer was harsh to his compatriots - he did not award any. However, if the neglect of the work of intellectuals by Christian Petzold or Philip Gröning drew criticism, there was only a sad sigh about Stuber. The painting is a genre - touching household tragicomedy. Not a festival film, but mainstream. With only one amendment: the cinema of many other countries can only dream of such a mainstream.

The action of the film takes place in the space of a giant shopping center, where the protagonist Christian comes in as a seller and part-time loader. He is young, shy and silent (and when he begins to speak, it turns out that he is still lisping), his arms and shoulders are covered with intricate tattoos, which he carefully hides under working clothes. Gradually, Christian meets his colleagues - Bruno's grumbler, under whose wing he is sent to the liquor department, a bore Wolfgang, the philosopher Jürgen and the governor Rudi. And with the beautiful Marion from the department of sweets, from which Christian literally cannot take his eyes off.

The wondrous love story here is nothing more than a shell, although it is charmingly executed. The hero and heroine are eyeing, listening, sniffing each other gradually. He has a criminal past, about which he is silent (as in any good film, in “In the Aisles” they are silent not just like that, but about something), she has a fighter husband. However, at work, they can afford not to notice this: drink coffee from a vending machine, admire a photo wallpaper with a palm tree and dream of an impossible vacation in a parallel world where they are destined to be together.

What you need to read between the lines is a quiet, precise, honest conversation about a “little man” in a capitalist society, where consumption has become the democratic norm: utopia, in fact, has come, just no one has become happy. It turns out that the supermarket was built on the site of truckers. Bruno, Rudi, Wolfgang and the others once drove the wagons and felt happy. However, that was a long time ago, even before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now that Germany has become united, former drivers have taken shelter in a mall, having relocated from giant trucks to small and slow trucks.

Quiet Christian - the only one who does not drive a car and gets to the house by bus; the right to control the loader he also gets not without difficulty. With amazing irony, Stuber includes in his leisurely and almost eventless picture shots from a training film about driving a forklift: in it, workers who violate safety rules experience grotesque bloody injuries, one after another. In the world of "In the Aisles" the likelihood of real action, strong emotions or exciting adventures is reduced to an absolute minimum. However, this does not mean that this world is cold and passionless. You just need to be able to warm it up a bit, and the director certainly has this skill.