Human Resource: Desiring desperation
“HR is not a human buffet.”
In his latest feature, Thai filmmaker Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit ingeniously connects the colloquial and literal meanings of “human resource(s),” holding a mirror up to our contemporary capitalist society.
Shortly after HR officer Fren (Prapamonton Eiamchan) finds out she is one month pregnant, she is tasked with the responsibility of finding a new assistant for her abusive and exploitative superior. The task is not an easy one in many ways. The job offers a neat desk by the window in an elegant downtown office (overlooking yet another identical corporate skyscraper), “flexible” work hours (one has to work overtime and on Saturdays), and close collaboration with the manager (whose verbal abuse most definitely led to the previous assistant’s disappearance).
The interview process is punctuated by a number of sadly hilarious moments, particularly one scene involving a TikTok ad. “HR is not a human buffet,” Fren’s colleague laments. Sadly, however, many applicants are more than willing to offer themselves up for the buffet. Desiring desperation despite themselves, most of the candidates readily accept each dehumanizing condition all while carefully rationalizing their choices. The dialogues reveal damning structures of power imbalance in which people grow up and which they internalize. For anyone who has gone through the corporate job interview process, these scenes will most likely hit uncomfortably close to home.
After these early humorous, engaging sequences, the narrative quickly settles into an overall cool detachment, which is also reflected in the blue-grey color palettes and Eiamchan’s understated performance. Fren’s husband, Thame, works in security technology, spending his days and nights focusing on marketing a stab-proof “casual wear” vest and rubbing shoulders with the right people to secure a contract for this new product. Thame and Fren’s encounters with a violent scooter driver on their commute back home through a narrow alley become a crucial narrative thread for not only driving the plot forward but also presenting the characters’ dispositions and relationships. Following the foreshadowing in this conflict, Thamrongrattanarit’s effectively restrained, non-dramatic direction thankfully averts the predictable and the pursuit of cheap shock value.
Visual metaphors abound throughout the film. From the opening long take of an ultrasound image to a table-top shot of a circle of cremated ash, the film’s visual language prompts fundamental questions regarding human life and how most of us are coerced to spend it. The film’s deconstruction of the myth of personal choice and liberty under capitalism proves razor-sharp in its incisiveness. Throughout the film—but particularly in one scene where Fren observes from her work how some window-cleaners dangle from the skyscraper across the street— Thamrongrattanarit seems to suggest that the only war that truly matters is the class war, and that the only meaningful class division is between the ultra-rich minority and the working majority.
The banal yet deadly everyday effects of this reality are explored through three intersecting dimensions: economic coercion, political apathy, and environmental collapse. Ultimately, the film presents an even sadder reality, one where rather than trying to solve the problems we are facing, everyone is trying to make enough money so that these problems don’t apply to them. Thus, the solution to crime and danger materializes as a stab-proof vest. Parents secure their children’s future by enrolling them in expensive international private schools. Rumors of environmental damage to water supply and the officials’ denial are dealt with by quietly installing water filters at home. This vision of collective problems and individual attempts at dealing with them is as bleak as it is critical.
Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit’s Human Resource is then a hard pill to swallow—a socially conscientious and critical work that is marked by bleak sincerity and a striking absence of wishful thinking regarding the “human buffet” in which the working majority remains trapped.
By Amarsana Battulga
Edited by Birgit Beumers
Copyright FIPRESCI