Mahairovgaltis

Boredom, the feeling of emptiness, lack of everyday life aesthetics, surroundedness by one-dimensional people etc are the common characteristics of the "realist" movies about lumpen working class. And they are all cursed with the same drawback: They all give the impression that someone put some cameras around and asked these working class people to live their daily lives as normal, and just because these people were aware of the cameras they were reluctant to show their very reality and in the end they performed what was expected from them. This is what makes an average realist movie even worse than a bad documentary: Realism tries to mimic the reality but reproduces the personal observations of the screenwriter and the director, while the documentaries have their own techniques to grasp what cannot be seen by a banal observation.

Good realist movies overcome these drawback in several ways: They tend to show the variation instead of the generalizable, they raise questions on behalf of the characters or the viewers, they even dare to suggest strategies to them.

And unfortunately this is not a good realist movie. It's a mere representation of reality and its final impression on the viewers is nothing but a reproduction of their prior opinions.