An intriguing and absorbing glimpse behind the scenes at a high end hotel in the Italian Dolomites, Carmen Trocker’s Personale follows often-exhausted staff as they set about folding towels, stripping beds, cleaning bathrooms, precisely fluffing pillows and – yes – cleaning up vomit, all in the name of creating a pristine room ready for the next guest. Day-after-day and hour-after-hour they must help create the image of hotel perfection.
In the windowless corridors and the noisy basement laundry this group of women and men (mainly women) from around the world together try to keep their spirits up, despite fatigue and chronic understaffing, all to serve the hotel’s ambition to gain another star. It already has four stars, and a fifth is tantalisingly in sight.
The strength and power of this classic fly-on-the-wall documentary is that guests are never seen and the (presumably) majestic beauty of the hotel – its foyers, bars and reception areas – is never filmed. Instead the camera shoots in close-up with blurred backgrounds as it follows the staff toiling in bathrooms, stripping sheets and clearing away room-service and general detritus. Just a few times there is a vague glimpse of the beautiful Dolomites through an open window, but this is brief and perfunctory before the narrative heads back to the basement laundry area.
The workers are – as might be expected – a mixed group of nationalities, with native Italians working with staff from Mali, Ukraine and Libya. In different languages they discuss the long hours they have worked, and sometimes argue about division of labour within the tasks for each room, but there is an underlying sense of friendship – or at least comradeship – as they display good nature to each other.
At the start of the film, one comments (in delightfully clichéd fashion) about a room – “what a mess…mamma mia” – before they set about cleaning up and preparing for the next guest. On the whole it is the women who clean the living areas (often at great speed) and the men are filmed cleaning and clearing in the spa room, and while the film never really allows a sense of what the bedrooms actually look like, the sense is that it really are very high-end.
Downstairs in the basement areas the noise of the industrial size driers dominates. At one point they are told how to fold towels and arrange cushions, and to “put more love into what you do.” In different languages they discuss how little they are paid, where their families are and what they will do with time off.
There are only two real moments of drama – when a bee comes into a bedroom as one of the cleaners is at work, and a worried debate about the cost of a cashmere sweater that might have shrunk in a wash to remove vomit stains. The purpose of the film is simply to record the lives of those who work behind the scenes. This is exemplified by an on-screen quote from Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man that we see at the film’s end. “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”
Italy-Austria, 2024, 93mins
Dir: Carmen Trocker
Production: Bagarrefilm, Mischief Films, Albolina Film
International sales: Filmdelights
Producers: Carmen Trocker, Ralph Wieser, Ronny Trocker
Cinematography: Malgorzata Szylak
Editor: Federico Neri
With: Lassina Kone, Maria Cristina Ciocan, Olena Mokilak, Sonja Planinsch, Camelia Ungureanu, Amelia Colonna, Simona Cogotti, Vukica Bumbesevic, Rodica Merlici, Aleksandra Lazic Jovanovic, Marisa Moro, Ruth Siehi Monsekela, Ibreahim Tounkara, Halima Sadeq, Zuzana Prekopova, Lassina Kone, Julia Prugger, Klodiana Dedej, Augustine Mahan Douan, Meldena Ese, Maya Petrova, Francesco Altomonte, Founeka Dabo
