Before I knew anything about Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, I assumed that it was going to be yet another film about the recent financial crisis, about the one percent, about G8 economies reluctant to learn their lessons — in short, themes which have now saturated popular discourse in a way that has made it difficult for them to remain engaging.
Indisputably, Payback’s main subject is debt, but the film presents the notion from a number of strikingly powerful perspectives, exploring its societal, personal, environmental, spiritual, criminal, and yes, economic, manifestations.
Payback — produced by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and playing now at Varsity Theatre in Toronto — is based on Margaret Atwood’s celebrated book and lectures of the same name. The film features Atwood herself as a kind of omnipresent narrator, whose narrative is the unifying thread for a number of seemingly discordant narratives. Settled within the pastoral Albanian countryside, two families are in a years-long Albanian blood feud; the Gulf of Mexico glistens with the aftermath of the BP oil spill (pictured above), as local life contemplates its future; a workers’ union struggles to carve out rights on behalf of exploited tomato farm workers in Florida; convicts ponder their wrongs and the purpose of imprisonment.
Writer/director Jennifer Baichwal (Manufactured Landscapes, Act of God) explores each of these stories by folding them into one another until a common thread is revealed. In each, the power dynamic is built on something owed, on reparation needed.
Baichwal’s film gives a brilliant practical reality to the philosophical questions Atwood asks in her book: What does ‘paying your debt to society’ really mean? What happens when someone decides to pay back? And what happens when the debt is so great it can’t be paid with money?
Payback does not insist on clear answers, but one thing the film does makes clear, in profound and moving ways, is that indebtedness and reparation are fluid, flexible concepts which depend on what we have chosen to value — both individually and collectively.
The film sets out these ideas by way of a series of short interviews with renowned thinkers Karen Armstrong, Raj Patel, Louise Arbour and William Rees. (The film’s one source of levity are the few appearances by Conrad Black, in which he gravely contemplates the role of prisons in the U.S. justice system while sitting in an expensively upholstered living room.)
Payback is simply outstanding, not only for its stunning cinematography, its sharp intelligence and focus, but also for its courage to begin a necessary conversation no one really wants to have.
Payback is now playing at the Varsity Theatre in Toronto.
Maria Gergin is a Toronto-based articling student.
Photo: Daniel Beltrá (courtesy of NFB)