Synopsis
The Notifier tells the story of Eloy (30 years old), a notifying officer for the Judiciary. A notifying officer is a public employee who delivers notices at the private addresses of the city inhabitants. Court notices are documents informing people the status of the legal cases they are involved in. I could be inheritance, wrongful discharge, threats, armed robbery, divorce, insanity, eviction. Eloy delivers 100 to 150 notices a day, which implies being in contact with 100 stories a day. Once the addressees are notified, he takes the notices to the office, where he is given another 100, mostly addressed to the same people he notified a few hours earlier. Eloy’s job is like that: circular, labyrinthine.
At the beginning of The Notifier, Eloy is in a court. There, in front of a series of wrongly notified notices, the secretary and a lawyer interrogate Eloy, take his statement and, above all, put him in a more and more tense situation. They ask him the toughest question: what he wants to do with his life. From that moment on, we will go to Eloy’s last week as a notifier.
That week will start with Eloy in a wake, telling an apprentice certain rules he has learnt as a notifying officer: (1) towards the end of the day, the notifier must have delivered all the notices he received; (2) the notices are the extension of a notifier’s life; if he leaves them, he is leaving an important part of his life; (3) each notice tells a story and, even though a notifier can access these notices directly, he is not allowed a close, human contact with the stories; (4) even when the event in the notice is very important, a notifier can only make a short report o everything in very few lines; (5) a notifier never justifies his acts, he just performs them; (6) it is very important for a notifier to have a good pen that can write on any kind of paper. Those are the basic rules that dominate Eloy’s life. Those are the rules he will have to brake in order to become who he was before.
Set in current Buenos Aires city, The Notifier narrates Eloy’s last days as a notifying officer. Far from being the promising young man he used to be, Eloy is now an alienated, downhearted, insensitive public employee who is found by the events of each day as a spectator more than a main character. With a life that has lost part of its sense and control, with his girlfriend abandoning him little by little and with a name that has stuck him in an eternal present, Eloy’s place is, more and more where those particular characters he meets with each notification are.
After teaching his apprentice the 6 basic rules, Eloy sees himself in a dead man he tries to notify. Little by little, the lonely characters and the absurd situations Eloy has to face in each notification start working as a mirror showing him what he has turned into: a person who does not think, feel or act on his own initiative to survive. With each notification, Eloy will get closer to the extravagant characters of the city, breaking the essential rules of his job (and of his life) and violating that fundamental notifier rule: not to interact with the notified. That is how Eloy will get in a series of situations, notifications which, like dominoes, will lead him to a marathon with many hurdles and a finishing line that is his own destiny. In that race there will be an explosion, the great change in which rebirth and happiness are possible.