Review: My Darling Supermarket Playfully Humanizes an Often-Invisible Workforce

It would have been easy for director Tali Yankelevich to paint a miserabilist portrait of the Brazilian grocery store at the heart of My Darling Supermarket, one focused on waste, workers contending with low wages, and racist customers. Brazil, after all, is a country defined by income inequality and class warfare. Instead, Yankelevich opts for something more playful, using a gliding camera, a whimsical score, and a cotton-candy aesthetic to make the Supermercado Veran in São Paulo seem like the Galeries Lafayette in Paris.

There are no grievances or injustices on display here—only pristinely white shelves, scrumptious merchandise, and workers who love their job. Some even admit to hooking up with customers. Others boast about the sheer diversity of people they’re exposed to every day. Relationships between co-workers are dreamily collegial. If the world outside is rife with poverty and crime, we wouldn’t know it from inside this little cocoon.

Yankelevich’s fantastical approach is too purposeful and consistent for the film to ever really feel like an advert for a hygienized country that doesn’t exist. My Darling Supermarket is, then, closer to a reverie, a hyper-focused portrait of a place that gleefully ignores the macro realities that surround it. As Yankelevich’s camera floats through the space of the store, she cobbles together observational vignettes and testimonies from employers whose anecdotes tend toward the fantastical. In the process, the camera humanizes an often-invisible workforce.

Instead of snatching sob stories from them, Yankelevich has the workers tell us about their passions, quirks, and dreams. We meet a warehouse loader obsessed with city-building games and skeptical that anyone would find his workplace worthy of cinematic attention, a George Orwell-reading history major, a singing janitor, a conspiracy theorist, a Japanese-speaking anime lover, a clerk convinced that the supermarket is haunted, and a security guard who wishes her surveillance cameras could determine her children’s whereabouts.

Most striking is how existential their questions all are, even if we never get a sense that the camera spent that much time with them. It’s as if they had been bottling up all sorts of profound musings in the boredom and automatism undergirding their jobs, and were finally able to find a willing audience. This is, perhaps, the inherent dynamic of the documentary as a form, the camera wooing strangers in need of a belated listener. Yankelevich does her subjects justice not by framing their accounts with self-important gravity, but by acknowledging the richness of their dream material, and dreaming together with them.