Unfiltered: a monument to Swiss e-commerce
Unfiltered, Digitec Galaxus’s origin story, is a tour de force about friendship, capitalism and just how far two men are willing to go to finally get into a club.
This review contains spoilers for 25 years of Swiss business history, Unfiltered and possibly the odd conflict of interest. The film is now available on YouTube.
You have to hand it to Unfiltered: the film doesn’t waste any time. Director and writer Jelena Vujović needs just about 15 minutes to cover 25 years of Digitec Galaxus. Other biopics need three hours, two Oscar-winning actors and at least one scene where somebody stands at night in front of their own larger-than-life billboard, wondering where it all began.
Instead, Unfiltered gives us Oliver Herren and Florian Teuteberg – two young Zurich natives denied entry to a club by a bouncer around the turn of the millennium. They draw the only reasonable conclusion from this: they must open their own club.
To do that, they need money. So they start selling computers. This side hustle becomes Digitec, Digitec later becomes Digitec Galaxus, and two thwarted partygoers become two of the more successful Swiss entrepreneurs of the past few decades.
If Mark Zuckerberg springs to mind, you’re not far off: according to The Social Network story, he dove into coding because Harvard’s final clubs wouldn’t take him. Although Herren and Teuteberg are the more consistent businessmen, as it turns out.
What’s the Swiss series «Tschugger» got to do with it?
It sounds like one of those all-too-smoothly staged founder stories that inevitably makes you suspicious. Suspicion that’s completely misplaced, in this case: director Vujović is no nobody in the Swiss cinema scene. On the contrary, for a writer-director toughened up by the «Tschugger» series (think urban combat in the Valais dialect, and Bernese underworld slang), a 15-minute corporate video about leading Swiss e-commerce company Digitec Galaxus is akin to a leap from short documentary to war film. I’m sure other directors would agree.
After all, you’ve got to start small before you’re ready to go big.
And Unfiltered is unquestionably big. If I had to expose this film’s DNA, it’d lie somewhere between The Social Network, The Wolf of Wall Street and Fight Club – the holy trinity of any film wanting to both celebrate and dissect capitalism.
Vujović’s Unfiltered has quite clearly borrowed the idea that two outsiders with a grudge could reinvent the world from Fincher and Sorkin’s The Social Network. And from Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, the intoxication of one’s own megalomania. And from Fincher, that ambivalence from Fight Club – the kind that has you simultaneously admiring and seeing through the protagonists.
Chapeau, Fincher. Apparently there’s no way around you in a story where two angry men cobble together their own new world order.
The scene the grandkids will still be talking about
There’s a moment in Unfiltered that’ll burn itself into film history much like the legendary shower scene from Psycho or the scene from The Seven Year Itch with Marilyn Monroe standing over a subway grate, white dress billowing in the wind. The moment in question is, of course, where Oliver Herren explains to a visibly overwhelmed interviewer that you can filter cables in the shop by length.
Source: Digitec Galaxus
Vujović uses what I can only call liturgical staging. The camera captures Herren’s outstretched arms as if he were standing at the bow of the Titanic, shouting, «I’m the king of the world!» The scene doesn’t need music. Vujović would never cheapen it like that. The director stages it with all too much polish, using a composition so perfectly thought through it would make even Steven Spielberg blush.
It’s reminiscent of Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden from Fight Club – the self-appointed prophet of non-ownership who preached to his disciples that the things you own end up owning you. Durden wanted to hammer that realisation into his followers’ heads by throwing punches and blowing up all credit card company buildings. Herren and Teuteberg have apparently drawn the more sensible conclusion here: if you’re going to own things, at least make sure the cable-length filter works.
The crisis that looks like one, but wasn’t really
Before the rise, every great epic needs a fall, and Unfiltered delivers it in the shape of a system migration. In the interview, Teuteberg describes the crisis as fairly unspectacular. On the other hand, Vujović gives us a flashback to what looks like the fall of Rome, with staff fleeing through the corridors, hastily grabbing their belongings, and rioting.
Source: Digitec Galaxus
In the middle of it all? A man who, even before this hour of greatest need, preferred to focus on his abs with an electrical ab stimulator, while his company burned to the ground around him.
The man’s name isn’t mentioned once in the film. I strongly suspect he’s the third co-founder and former co-owner. Is this omission down to modesty, dramatic calculation or simply a legal department’s justified caution? I can’t say. I’ll just call him the «Third Man» from now on.
A radical narrative decision revolves around him. While his fellow founders fight for the company’s future, the Third Man wages a quieter, perhaps more personal battle against insufficient ab definition. Where Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort famously drags himself through his own office on a dose of Quaaludes in The Wolf of Wall Street, this man stands bolt upright, abs braced, while the company genuinely threatens to come crashing down all around him. Perhaps that’s actually a healthier way of handling a crisis.
Source: Digitec Galaxus
Whether Vujović is commenting on the loneliness of the modern manager or simply found a good gag, I’ll leave to film scholars. For my part, I lean towards the latter reading after careful consideration. Sometimes the simplest interpretation is indeed the right one.
As is well known, the company is saved by the big orange M, in a twist usually reserved for divine intervention. As the House of Duttweiler steps in, capital starts flowing, Galaxus is born and a computer shop grows into an online retailer for pretty much everything. The rest, as they say, is history.
Except, in this case, history is co-written by the very entity that would come to hold the majority of shares. A point of criticism the filmmakers will simply have to accept is that the majority shareholder – sorry, I mean saviour in a time of need – is portrayed so faultlessly, rather than as a business partner with its own balance sheet and profit motives.
The circle closes
Amends are made by a finale with a plot twist, as Herren and Teuteberg confess, after 25 years of growth, crisis and cable lengths, that Digitec Galaxus was never actually their goal. It was always just a means to an end. The end being: clubs. We are, to borrow Tyler Durden’s words again, the middle children of history, with no Great War, no Great Depression. Herren and Teuteberg only had a bouncer.
That had to suffice as their origin trauma – and, as it turns out, it absolutely did.
What follows is perhaps the boldest deconstruction of the capitalist success narrative since Fight Club: the two of them sell their shares and buy up Zurich’s club scene. No, not just a club. All the clubs. Outside the Zurich head office, staff and the public try in stunned disbelief to understand what’s just happened to one of Switzerland’s most successful companies. Meanwhile, the founders dance towards their fate with the unrestrained physicality of Tom Cruise as Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder.
Source: Digitec Galaxus
The bouncer lost. Full circle moment.
In a nutshell
Zurich’s Citizen Kane of online retail
Is Unfiltered objective? Of course not. The film was funded by Digitec Galaxus, made for Digitec Galaxus, and you’re reading this review right here in the Digitec Galaxus magazine. Rest assured, my journalistic independence remains entirely unaffected. At least until my next pay cheque.
But objectivity has never been the yardstick great cinema had to measure up to. Unfiltered knows exactly what it is: an origin myth inflated to the breaking point. And in this very shamelessness, there’s an almost touching honesty. Charles Foster Kane had Rosebud; Herren and Teuteberg, a bouncer. In the end, every empire needs a wound to be built on.
I write about technology as if it were cinema, and about films as if they were real life. Between bits and blockbusters, I’m after stories that move people, not just generate clicks. And yes – sometimes I listen to film scores louder than I probably should.
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