Farewell Gary

Farewell Gary is a film which eschews action and plot in favour of a gently poetic portrayal of the harsh social reality at its core. The film derives its strength from successfully examining a weighty social issue through the emotional predicaments of various individuals, and also embraces the audience with set-up, locations and characters. Director Amaouche also injects a fair amount of humour and fantasy into the film. The story is set in a working-class town in the South of France, where a factory on the outskirts is abandoned after closure. The resignation and despair of the people left behind and the decline of some into lawlessness permeate every shot of Farewell Gary. Writer-director Nassim Amaouche’s political message is highly apposite: the powerful unionism of yesteryear, social security and the one-time solidarity between workers have been defeated by the whims of capitalism and its insistence on profitability before all else… Is it possible to rebuild a life on the ruins of capitalism? Or will the consumer society destroy them with its conceit? Farewell Gary focuses on the inevitable breakdown of parent-child relationships in a section of society crushed by poverty and deprivation; but it also highlights the deepening of the generational rift in the changing social environment. Equally, the film underlines the influence of nationality and ethnicity on individual identity and the tendency to lapse into criminality when the workers of the world fail to unite. Alin Taşcıyan