I Would Like to See It: The Platform

Like La Grande Bouffe and other eating-as-class movies of its ilk, Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia’s The Platform locates class struggle in the fairly pat metaphor of who gets to eat what. In a Cube-like tower built from identical two-person cells and connected by a single empty shaft, the titular platform descends each day from the gourmet kitchens above, freighted with a bounty of food which within a few floors has been thoroughly ransacked and despoiled. Each subsequent floor is left to pick over the previous cell’s leftovers until the glassware and serving dishes are licked clean, at which point the unfortunate inmates below must fend for themselves. Cannibalism is commonplace, inter-level cooperation virtually unheard of, and when at the end of each month the tower’s occupants are sent apparently at random to new levels, the rush to assume one’s new place in the hierarchy of eat or be eaten commences at once and without reflection on the ways in which the system fits together as a whole.

Above the tower is the faceless apparatus of the Administration, a stand-in for the combined power of government and corporate wealth. The tower itself, then, can be understood as a metaphor not just for extremes of wealth and poverty but for the artificial struggle into which society’s rulers force all those beneath them and the cheerful participation of those rewarded even with scraps from the master’s table. The Administration bureaucrat Imoguiri (Antonia San Juan), who submitted herself to the program after receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis, believes it functions as a way to foster “spontaneous acts of solidarity”. Goreng (Iván Massagué), her cellmate and the film’s protagonist, suggests that its purpose is precisely the opposite, and that if such solidarity did emerge the Administration would see it only as an opportunity to figure out how to prevent it happening in the outside world.

In addition to the disconnected moralizing and naivete of the establishment liberal, the film considers the broader problem of the selfish individual, represented first by the crass, earthy Trimagasi (Zorion Eguileor). What do you do with someone who, while not an oligarch by any means, can’t see past their own nose, whose life is ruled by dull material desire, when the time comes to attempt a radical reorganization of society? What do you do with someone whose motivations and passions are contemptible to you? Do you have the right to force your own beliefs upon them for the good of the whole? It isn’t particularly deep, but between Massagué’s and Eguileor’s strong chemistry and the film’s simple but pleasingly grimy aesthetic The Platform conjures enough charm and desperation to sell its central feeling: that of flailing with inadequate tools and blinkered knowledge at a problem seemingly unassailable in its sheer scale.