Directed by Cyril Schäublin
Country: Switzerland
Cyril Schäublin’s feature debut, “Those Who Are Fine”, renders a scam story involving elderly women as preys in today’s Internet world. Following four short films, the young Swiss director imagines a female call center employee who tricks a few grandmothers using a false quest for urgent financial help as she pretends to be their granddaughters.
Alice Turli (Sarah Stauffer) is one of the 'inhumane' call center representatives at Everywhere Switzerland, an Internet service provider that offers up one of the most competitive prices in the market. She is a lonesome girl who takes advantage of her job to obtain extra information from wealthy elderly targets. In addition to questions like “how fast is your Internet connection” or “how often do you use the Internet”, Alice queries about their date of birth, bank account type, and approximate current balance. We follow her scamming the good-willing Mrs. Oberli (Margot Gödrös), who, despite the bank’s laborious security procedures, was more than happy to withdraw 50 thousand francs for her granddaughter. A meet up is scheduled, but instead of the latter is Alice who shows up to receive the money, exhibiting a mix of satisfaction, underestimation, and contempt in her face.
Schäublin uses the camera in a curious way, opting for sharp close-ups, medium-long shots with half-body characters occupying only one side of the frame, and a few high-angles where she captures the austerity of the streets, the urban architecture and busy traffic in the unattractive outskirts of Zurich.
Intertwining with Alice’s path, we hear conversations among a group of policemen assigned to carry out security checks at certain locations of the city. The topics of their conversation include Internet speeds and prices, health insurance, and movies, whose titles nobody remembers. Ironically, one of them croons Elton John’s ‘Your Song’, and in a different occasion, another one interrogates and frisks Alice, whose fraudulent ways needed another type of strategy to be unmasked.
The guileful, achingly unemotional swindler opens a bank account with a large sum of dishonestly-earned money. That doesn’t weigh a bit in her conscience. In this aspect, debutant actor Sarah Stauffer was perfect, emulating the imperturbability of her character through a casual acting style. But because the more money you have, the more you want, Alice has no plans to stop and approaches her next victim, a senile woman living in a dementia caregiver center.
The drama relies on an interesting idea that never develops into something completely satisfactory. Regardless of a possible posterior connection, many scenes feel derivative, lost in redundant dialogues that drag the story to its limits. Even the finale promised tension but ended up wrapped in a melancholic apathy. Drowned in passwords, codes, and missing film titles, “Those Who Are Fine” runs at slow speeds and only intermittently connects. It would have easily been a more stimulating short film than a feature.
