"You know
what it's like to go to work in a place where people hate you?
Exhilarating!" wheezes a corpulent vacuum-cleaner salesman
named Tommy (Timothy Spall) to his feckless trainee in Vacuuming
Completely Nude In Paradise. Vacuuming is one of two
short films from director Danny Boyle (one-half of the team
responsible for Trainspotting). Smoking too much and breaking
too many traffic laws to count, Tommy is desperate to meet his quota
so that he can win JAC Vacuum Company's "Salesman of the
Year" award. Tommy's life is his work, with an apartment that's
little more than a closet holding the latest suit and a shower, and
a taste for entertainment which doesn't extend beyond the endless
braying of his self-created motivational tapes during the dash from
one sales call to the next. More than his apartment is dirty; he'll
foist vacuums upon mothers on the dole who can barely afford to make
ends meet, and even pretend to be in love with a woman in order to
get her to sign a sales contract. His fellow employees hate him as
much for his sleazy demeanor as for his sales totals; in their
opinion, his comeuppance should have arrived by yesterday.
Yet, as he bashfully admits to the trainee, he has a spiritual side: he envisions paradise as a place in which one can vacuum uninhibited by worldly demands (hence the film's title). The trainee, for his part, is there only to please the demands of his girlfriend, who is tired of having to support this dreamer of a boyfriend by working as a stripper. Tommy attempts to oblige the trainee to sink to his own repulsive level, but the trainee has another idea about his future employment, one which, in the first of many ironies that punctuate Vacuuming, stands a chance of being realized. In certain respects, the film's ending seems too pat and inevitable, and full of symbolism applied with all the restraint of someone working with an overflowing trowel, but the performances are dead-on. Spall's Tommy charges through the film like a bull in a china shop, as a man whose bluster barely conceals his inner distress and desperate need to have his hard work validated by society; Tommy, however, is racing toward a success that seems to get further and further beyond his reach. He becomes the illustrative example of why success is not a goal, but a progress.
Likewise with Strumpet, with
its rags-to-riches storyline involving a brilliant, but emotionally
unhinged, street poet and an abused girl who rise and fall in the
land of corporate rock. Boyle's examination of how performers are
packaged in what Joni Mitchell referred to as the "star-making
machinery behind a popular song" is mercilessly funny; the
scene in which the two newcomers are in negotiations with the music
company, in league with a manager more amateurish than they, is
laced with enough mordant wit to make you cringe and laugh
simultaneously. You can see the three of them heading straight for
the meat grinder fifteen minutes into the film. The question is,
however, just what choices they will, or can, make as the machinery
threatens to consume their dreams. Despite the harshness of satire
that permeates Strumpet, it also contains exquisitely-drawn
characterizations, played with such precision, that even in the
midst of whatever madness is unfolding on screen, you never lose
sight of the band members' need for acceptance, no matter how much
they may deny it. Both Vacuuming and Strumpet are
inspired examples of how a talented filmmaker can make films that
provide a multifaceted picture of humanity without requiring three
hours of running time.