Film Review: 'The Trader' (2018)

The film, 'The Trader', retells the story of an economic 'intermediary' of a global capitalist world. It tells the story of a Georgian broker merchant, called the 'sovdagar' (surprisingly similar to Indonesian word 'saudagar') who buys out 'products' or 'things' from cheap second-hand stores in Tibilisi, the 'capital' of Georgia, and sell them to the countryside. Most of the products seemed to be made of industrial materials not produced in Georgia, and imported from elsewhere – things which you might have seen in toko kelontong of a merry shopping streets.

The first part of the short film showed how he shopped in the stores and attempted to acquire as many 'things' as possible at a low price, under the condition that those 'things' were 'easily exchangeable'. Thus from the beginning the plan is just to do simple trade (dagang), buying from shops, selling them right after. The second – and longest – part depicts his effort to find rural communities that will buy the 'things'. He went to the potato' planters' village by driving his minivan. The vividness of farmers' lives is portrayed with close-up recording of potato harvest machinery, potato planting procedures, and collecting of hay, which mount up at some sides of the plantations. Children, middle-aged and old farmers as well as retired inhabitants of the production village were depicted in their 'simple' lives at home, on the streets, and in the process of transaction with the 'trader'. At the moment of selling, he just stopped at some points in the village and opened wide his minivan's back door. Adjusting to the villagers' profiles, he had various methods; he attracted children by playing with soap bubbles in front of the vans, and interested children ran around. To them, he introduced the 'things' he bought from the capital. Some children asked, 'what is this' and 'that'; they partially did not recognize those 'things', for they were stuffs that are not part of their daily rural lives. The trader, knowing that children held no means of exchange, kept asking them to bring their parents along, so that they could buy them 'these nice things'. Their parents finally came and, as other potential consumers of the village also did, asked for the price of the 'things'. The 'things' were winter shoes, glittering bags, clothing, sponges, buckets, and all those industrially mass-produced goods, produced perhaps in Georgian capital or other World capitals. The trader will answer in either monetary units or kilograms of potatoes.

Source: IMDb 

The movie reminds me much of with Herry Santoso's work (Rajah Merah) on Dieng's potato planters. The mobile 'traders' crossed my mind in Dieng who bring 'things' from Javanese cities in their motorcycles, to Dieng's potato planters’ villages uphill. Capitalism in Georgian villages and Javanese villages surprisingly takes on a similar face: dependency on capitalist commodities to produce and make a living, and attraction of capitalist 'things' to consume. What differed was that in Dieng, all farmers are well equipped with 'cash', and transactions occurred with money, unlike in 'The Trader' where only potato exchange or barter occurred. Some retired, and old folks even asked him to present some 'things' as 'gifts' for they had neither money nor potatoes to offer him – a moral economywas tried out there, but without success, for the trader wanted either money or potatoes, not God's blessing. Isn't it ironic that even in Europe, despite Georgia's geographical and relative position in its periphery, barters still take place? while various European sociologists proclaim that Europe has modernized entirely and that money has absolutely become the 'medium' of transaction? This short movie indeed puts in question the local empirical validity of those universalized claims: it points at the varieties of modern capitalist systems.

If Santoso says that those purchased 'goods' symbolize the acquisition of 'modernity' or modern lifestyle in clothing styles, house tools, and gadgets as much as the accumulation of wealth of those Diengs' individual farmers, the admiring gaze of the Georgian potato farmers towards those colorful 'things' in the minivan recalls a similar pattern. Those 'things', attractive in their colors, shapes, materiality, functional specificities, 'expensive', 'looking nice', reveal themselves as something coming from the 'city' – in itself often constructed as the modern counterpart of villages – and transformed into 'desired objects'. It is unclear in the Georgian village whether the sold objects could create a new hierarchy of objects, that the modern objects coming from the 'sovdagar' are superior to the 'traditional' objects, like the Santoso's case. Perhaps those objects really entered the rural life and got integrated in vernacular ways according to the localized village culture. For if you pay attentions to all details of life in the village of the movie, one notices striking vernacular cultures in the way people talk, behave, joked, and live daily lives. Yet, the capitalist 'things' could easily penetrate them – another cultural area.

Source: Kurzfilmfestival Köln

All in all, the barter system in fact, enabled a capitalist handling of things: the distribution of 'things' from the manufacturers somewhere on earth until them reaching the last buyers who desired them without knowing who produced them and for what purpose. The Georgian 'trader', thus, was the operator of World Capitalism in the rural depths of the country, even where people do not live according to modern and metropolitan standards – thus the concept: capitalist intermediary. He not only brought the 'things' and caused its integration with lifestyles of the people in the rural area, but also can be said to have changed the 'taste' of the rural people for he has brought new desired objects for them. The 'sovdagar' is the broker of both World Capitalism and the world's taste, but for what purpose?

After two days of convincing farmers to buy the 'things', the trader drove back to Tbilisi. He sold the potatoes early in the morning in some markets in the capital. His face looked happy. The last scene depicts what he did after selling: gambling in a card game. He has a life and had fun anyway.

About Author

Geraldus Martimbang is a doctoral researcher at the Technical University of Munich, where he researches the social, economic, and spatial history of colonial tea plantations in Priangan, West Java. Trained as an architect and urban planner, he has worked in Germany and France as an architect and now at project management consultancy.