THE COLOR OF PAIN

It starts with an old-fashioned office in an administration charged with applying new laws
ordering businesses to open their doors to medical inspectors. It is the start of a long
journey through production sites – metallurgy, greenhouse strawberry production,
computer work – filmed for a year and presented via the filter of legislative articles and
the medical viewpoint. So a double exploration is undertaken, combining an observation
of medicine at work and an inventory of multiple working conditions. During one interview
the question “Will you be filming the lapses in security too?” is posed. The question hangs
in the air, without a reverse shot, because the issue lies elsewhere.
The film avoids the spectacular and the pathos of pain, substituting them with a legal
attention to detail and a meticulousness that is not devoid of humour, but without pursuing
the picturesque or the exotic, which enables the restitution of the spaces and the situations
in all their banality. The film therefore does not shy away from accumulating dreary scenes
and repeated gestures, with a distant and scrupulous point of view of the downside of the
world of work, medicine included, where comedy and the absurd lie in wait. Undoubtedly,
it is there that the medical viewpoint at work, its dialectic of the interior and surfaces,
connects (in a well-known relationship) with the work of the cinema. It is a long-haul trip
that weaves unexpected links and gradually approaches more unstable zones, digressions
and diversions, heading towards regions that are as surprising as they are unexpected,
including that of the image itself. (NF)