Set in the eastern German equivalent of a Costco, Thomas Stuber’s In the Aisles scrutinizes work friendships with a keen sense of how they evolve from clipped, polite niceties to inside jokes and private confidences. At the outset, the film delineates the mores of such relationships as neatly as DP Peter Matjasko captures the store’s well-stocked aisles, in tall, clean lines that extend out to the vanishing point. This aesthetic fastidiousness matches the well-cultivated mixture of curiosity and suspicion with which a weathered staff greets a new employee. Here, the new guy is Christian (Franz Rogowski), a shelf stacker who’s on probation and who tries to hide his expansive tattoos under collared shirts.
Christian’s checkered past isn’t terribly dramatic or mysterious, but it’s not meant to be. Stuber’s film is firmly grounded in the lives of low-wage workers looking for nothing more than a reliable paycheck and minimal trouble. As such, In the Aisles is agreeable but—even at a lengthy 125 minutes—relatively free of incident, primarily focusing on Christian’s relationships with his two primary companions on the job: Bruno (Peter Kurth), the gruff but tender-hearted head of the beverage department who serves as Christian’s mentor; and Marion (Sandra Hüller), the mischievous and mysterious stocker in sweet goods one aisle over.
The limited or diminished ambitions of the workers are exemplified by the film’s great attention to the forklift. Stuber opens In the Aisles with a dolly shot set to Strauss’s “Blue Danube,” cutely referring to 2001: A Space Odyssey as a fleet of forklift drivers head to their assigned aisles. Though it’s primarily a metaphor for modest dreams, the vehicle is also a marker of territory and hierarchy. Christian has to take a class before he can operate a forklift, and his in-store final exam is the closest the film comes to a triumphant moment.
Rather than an endless drag, Christian and his co-workers view their work as a respite from their struggles at home. He and Marion flirt at a coffee machine in the break room, one wall of which is covered with a Michael Mann-style beach scene. In the Aisles alludes to her ongoing marriage to a bad husband but never actually interrogates it. (Though Hüller finds some soul in Marion’s melancholic whimsy, her character is victimized in disappointingly vague terms.) Likewise, Stuber’s film teases a romance that fizzles in favor of friendship. A scene where Christian visits her home is shot like a home-invasion movie, a clever indication of how these workers prefer to leave their personal troubles out of the workplace. By subverting the impulse to indulge a winning romance between its two bright European stars, In the Aisles insists on the dignity of its appealing but rather thin characters.
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