Great Yarmouth: Provisional Figures

Tânia (Beatriz Batarda), known as Tat, is working on improving her English. She listens to tapes in her car, in her bed, anywhere where she can get a bit of time alone. “Great amenities,” she repeats, and “View of the seafront.” These phrases, and others like them, crop up again and again over the course of Marco Martins’ film, which explores a seaside town full of exploitation, misery and decay.

Officially, Tânia is just a hotel manager. Unofficially, she’s a broker for dozens of Portuguese people who arrive in the UK seeking work. Post-Brexit, and with the visa system under tremendous strain so that even those who might be eligible would struggle to get one within a reasonable time, that means working illegally, which leaves them wide open to exploitation. One employers tells her that he prefers hiring Roma people because they complain less. She points out that that’s because most of them can’t speak the language. Her Portuguese workers have a least a decent basic education. It means that they expect more, but desperation will soon knock that out of them. It’s easier for them to follow instructions, and before long they learn to do as they’re told.

The first shock comes with the hotels themselves. Some of them actually do have sea views, but they’re damp and mould-infested, and some workers are expected to sleep three to a room. Tânia knows how to keep their complaints at bay, assuring them that this is only temporary. Where her gangster boyfriend uses threats, she comes across as sympathetic and kindly, taking pride in the fact that she can get people to put up with horrendous things and still call her Mother. They let her take their passports to keep them ‘in a safe place’. In the factories, they stand up with their hands raised for inspection. They look not dissimilar from the turkeys hanging up by their feet on the production line. One of the turkeys is still alive, struggling desperately as the automatic best carries it towards the machine which will rip off its wings.

Birds are everywhere here. In the salt marshes just beyond the town lives an old man who used to be paid to look after wildfowl. Now he lingers there in his shabby caravan, huis job to dispose of bodies. In the hotels, Tânia, dreaming of bigger things, folds towels into the shape of swans. She advises tenants to rub Vicks under their noses so that they won’t be bothered by the smell of the place.

Tânia has a lover amongst the workers, a secret from her boyfriend. They meet in one of the rooms. We hear Schubert’s Fantasie in F Minor for Four Hands, a lonely omen. She tells her lover that they will run away together and open nice hotels for elderly guests and make everything beautiful. Of course, that’s not the way things work for people in Tânia’s position. This isn’t the seaside dream world of candy floss and buckets and spades.

They call the workers ‘provisional figures’. It’s the official designation for migrants whose status is unknown. In places, dark humour seeps into the film like the rot around the hotel windows. There’s a gulf between the language Tânia learns and the language she’s surrounded by in the real world. At the end, before the credits, comes the legend ‘based on the accounts of Great Yarmouth residents.’ It’s a dark thing all the way through, this film, England’s dreaming in the thick of night.

Great Yarmouth: Provisional Figures screened as part of the Glasgow Film Festival.