‘Shame and Money’ Review: A Keenly Observed, Sharp-Edged Portrait of a Kosovo Family Divided by Class

“Are you fine with not sleeping at night?” an employer asks a candidate for a lowly security guard position, late in Kosovan director Visar Morina‘s new film “Shame and Money.” The question refers simply to the job’s antisocial hours, though it’s one that various characters in this stoic, slowly lacerating look at economic desperation and exploitation in contemporary Europe could stand to be asked, for a variety of reasons. Broke and anxiously navigating the urban menial employment market after having to abandon the family farm, middle-aged Shaban (Astrit Kabashi) is lying awake most nights, whether he’s working or not. Meanwhile, those higher up the capitalist food chain probably aren’t tossing and turning nearly as much as they should be.

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize in Sundance’s world cinema competition, Morina’s third feature sees him turning his focus back to his homeland, after his excellent, likewise Sundance-premiered 2020 sophomore effort “Exile” offered a bitingly comic look at the Kosovan immigrant experience in modern Germany. There is markedly less humor in the studied, achingly sober “Shame and Money,” which again examines social outsider status, but this time with wealth and class — whether inherited or suddenly acquired — as the dividing barriers. Though his latest is a slow burn offering little in the way of hope or levity, Morina doesn’t trade in one-note miserablism either: Intricately observed domestic dynamics keep the drama textured and humane, as does Kabashi’s delicately layered performance as a man softly beaten down but screaming on the inside.

A somewhat protracted first act, set in a dusty rural village not far from Kosovo’s capital Pristina, introduces a host of knotty tensions and conflicts in the extended family of dairy farmer Shaban, his wife Hatixhe (Flonja Kodheli) and their three young daughters — and that’s well before an inciting setback that relocates the action to the city. While Shaban and Hatixhe make a modest but solid living, with his mother Nana (Kumrije Hoxa) carefully managing the household income, Shaban’s irresponsible, work-shy younger brother Liridon (Tristan Halilaj) is in desperate need of cash. A third brother, the hot-tempered Agim (Abdinaser Beka), has no desire to help, but Shaban is an easier mark — and when Liridon takes off without warning or payback, the family is left in dire financial straits.

With the farm suddenly unsustainable, there’s nothing for it but to pack up and seek work in Pristina, where Hatixhe’s sister Lina (Fiona Gllavica) lives a comfortable nouveau riche life in a large, gleaming new-build home courtesy of her entrepreneur husband Alban (Alban Ukaj). Alban isn’t one for handouts, but he does offer his country-bumpkin in-laws part-time employment as a cleaners at a nightclub he owns — a somewhat high-handed treatment of kith and kin that is echoed in Lina’s awkward domestic arrangement, where she’s paid scant pocket money to work as a carer for Alban’s ailing, disabled father (Selman Lokaj). Even when you marry up, it seems, you’re briskly reminded of your true place on the social ladder.

The work offered by Alban isn’t sufficient for the couple to make a living, least of all in a new-to-them urban economy where everything from renting an apartment to making a bank withdrawal comes with hidden costs. Yet their attempts to find supplementary employment are frequently thwarted — including by Alban and Lina, who deem it embarrassing for the family for Shaban to be seen as a day laborer, and repeatedly instruct him to polish up his non-existent CV instead. Though Hatixhe pointedly reminds Lina that shame is a luxury most can’t afford to feel, she’s equally uneasy about taking money and gifts when her sister offers them. Morina’s complex screenplay has little interest in moral binaries, which tends to leave the politics unspoken. Instead, it keenly watches how each character locates the precise level of personal corruption at which they feel able to function in a society built on the bottom line.

Interjections of strident folk singing sporadically disrupt the film’s otherwise muffled, throbbing soundtrack: bitter signifiers to the characters and audience alike of simpler, more rustic ways of life that have been forcibly left behind. Often favoring intimate, nervy tracking shots, Janis Mazuch’s cinematography is fluid and unassuming — save for in one showpiece shot, circling a raucous musical gathering in Pristina’s central town square. There, the camera also swirls around the surreal landmark of a Bill Clinton statue, watching passively over the bustle of the city from a lofty height. To anyone who cares to look up and notice, it’s a quaint reminder of when the future, and Eastern Europe’s westward-looking economic ideals, looked quite different from the cynical survival struggle of today.