Director: Pete Ohs
Writers: Stephanie Hunt, Will Madden, Pete Ohs
Stars: Stephanie Hunt, Will Maden, Frank Mosley
Synopsis: Diane and Fox love to work. Unfortunately, they live in a polarized world where having a job is illegal.
Pete Ohs is a director whose work should be on anyone’s radar if they are seeking out quietly subversive and philosophical stories delivered with sincerity and more than a dash of absurdist comedy. His love/hate relationship with Americana comes to the fore in films such as Youngstown (also starring Stephanie Hunt) which acts as both a comedy and commentary on rust belt towns. Originally raised in Ohio, Ohs blends genres to speak about how we make connections and why we do what we do. Teaming once again with Stephanie Hunt, Alexi Pappas, and Will Madden, and bringing on the excellent Frank Mosely – Love and Work is a labor of love about the love of labor.
In an alternate timeline, county ordinances have decided that the world simply has too much “stuff.” It’s now considered illegal to manufacture anything. Having a job which leads to a completed product is an offense that can see people be forced into coerced rehabilitation. People who want to work are part of an underground network who use specific code words. Diane (Hunt) is a serial offender who has crossed state lines to avoid prosecution. She ends up in what seems like a ruined industrial town with the sounds of trains and whistles haunting the background. She gets a job in a “factory” run by manager Hank (Frank Mosely). Their job is to assemble shoes. They are made of scraps of other shoes and don’t require to be wearable or in a pair. There she meets Bob Fox (Will Madden), and they develop a tentative romance.
The factory is raided by the productivity police and Vik (Alexi Pappas) lets Bob and Diane go with a strike warning. Hank is not so lucky – it’s his third strike and he’s out. Ohs, with co-writers Hunt and Madden, utilize both “employment speak” and “law and order” speak. Employees often operate under a three-warning rule before termination. Famously, America has implemented the controversial and often reductive habitual offender law across several states. Although the law can be used for keeping serious criminals incarcerated, it more often punishes those involved with petty theft or drug related incidents. In the timeline where Love and Work occurs wanting to work is akin to being a junkie (something Frank Mosely’s Hank displays with alacrity).
Filmed in black and white in and around Corsicana, Texas and using 100W – Corsicana Artists & Writers Residency as the main stage, Ohs creates a timeless “sleepy town” which modernity passed by. The film is set both in the past, the present, and a possible future. It is truly a utopian dystopia (see also Everything Beautiful is Far Away). Losing their jobs as cobblers, Diane and Bob see a graveyard filled with the occupations which have been corporatized in some manner or turned into artisan pursuits. “The butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker,” of nursery rhymes are a dead class.
The question arises if Diane and Bob’s relationship can continue to work if work is their primary focus. The pure joy of getting a job leads them to a drinking session where Diane cries out, “We’re getting hiiiiiiiiiired!” Of course, getting hired can also lead to getting arrested because people act as undercover narcs. Eventually, one of them will end up in a “time out,” being forced to relax and take up a hobby that ostensibly doesn’t contribute anything to society (although considering some of them are learning an instrument and making music, the idea of what contributes to society is deliberately skewed).
Stephanie Hunt is an immensely talented comedic performer and writer, and her Diane is nigh on perfect. Casting Will Madden (known for playing annoying “creepy guys”) as the romantic hero is a stroke of genius. Ohs is playing with the audience but has something specific to say about how we have all lost our ability to balance our time. To create the work/life balance and have let go of the satisfaction of doing something well. There is too much “stuff” around. We have become consumers on a granular level. It isn’t just the miles of landfill where fast fashion and discontinued Funko Pops end up causing a pollution crisis no one knows how to reckon with. It is also how we perceive creativity and work itself.
People constantly laugh about mid-level-management, but what if your goal is to be someone who creates opportunities to work in an environment where unemployment is skyrocketing, and the wealth gap is baked into generational experience? Imagine telling a Nana that knitting a sweater for someone is a crime because there are already enough sweaters out there. Some parts of work are fuelled by the necessity to keep the lights on, others exist because they are acts of genuine grace.
With the elegance and wit of Jacques Tati and a complex lacework script which points to where humanity is in their overworked, underpaid, and often not appreciated quotidian lives, Ohs has once again captured how hard it is to just “be” in a world where your job could be taken at any second by an algorithm and how hard it is to keep one’s personal relationships alive when the focus is on career and success.
The maxim “Work to live not live for work” is so often repeated it has become almost meaningless. People imagine not having to do anything. To have a chance to just stop and smell the flowers. Or a reversion to the idealized childhood state where, in the best circumstances, someone else took care of your basic needs and gave you the opportunity hang out in a playground and cry out “wheee!” on a swing set. It’s why there seems to be a collective amnesia about the fact that so far, no form of political or economic governance has come up with the solution for any society to function without labor. Late-stage Capitalism is bad, but serfdom was worse.
Maybe, as the narrator of the film suggests “Wondering is a lot like working,” and maybe the solution exists in something that was instituted years ago. Ohs’ breezy and glorious romantic comedy is a trojan horse. He doesn’t want the audience working too hard to enjoy the film, but he has put in the work to make you love it and maybe you will take a second to just go do something you want to do for the sake of doing it. Or you can take a well-deserved nap.
