NYFF '24: "bluish" paints post-COVID malaise in many shades

by Nick Taylor

A quick note of appreciation: I am so excited to have received press accreditation to digitally cover this year’s New York Film Festival. This is pretty amazing! Even if I’m sitting at home, nestling with my man and our cats for a good movie rather than sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with the likes of Payal Kapadia and Mati Diop, this is a version of a dream fulfilled. Honestly, being able to appreciate a film festival without being separated from the kids might even be the preferable option? Much to consider.

But enough about me! Instead let’s talk about bluish, the very first film I watched as part of this NYFF coverage. Directed by Milena Czernovsky and Lilith Kraxner, bluish follows two unnamed young women played by Leonie Bramberger and Natasha Goncharova, navigating life in an Austrian metropolis that should feel more lively than it is. The city and the protagonists are stumbling through a post-lockdown balance of intimacy and isolation. There’s still noise and color and motion, but it all feels so fragile now, so much harder to participate in. bluish is a sad film, but it’s also one of the most evocative portraits of trying to reintegrate into society and full personhood in the wake of COVID (which is still happening, by the way!!) I’ve seen yet...

If this premise sounds narratively sparse but tonally and aesthetically evocative, you couldn’t be more right. Details about the women’s lives, relationships, and desires are invisible to the audience. The stagnancy of existence, punctuated by small activities and gestures, is the film’s main avenue for depicting these women. It all feels like we’re waiting for something to happen, delaying a payoff that most likely will never arrive. Sometimes you just gotta roll a ball with protruding nubs across your face as a stim object. Even more poignant are the rare moments of genuine interaction, like when Bramberger’s young woman plays a blinking game with a young kid in a doctor’s waiting room.

bluish is an apt title, thematically and visually. Even the lowercase b fits the film perfectly. Czernovsky and Kraxner’s approach is all about tone, about evoking the girl’s interiorities through the tactility of objects and the empty spaces enclosing the characters and the city. Dialogue is at an absolute minimum. If there’s a score, I don’t remember it, though we get some musical performance and tentative keyboard playing. The sound mix is keyed to a delicate blankness, particularly the way any little noise can feel amplified in a gaping, barely-inhabited room. Even the air reverberates differently in each space, without the oppressive claustrophobia one might associate with that level of environmental detail. 

Still, you could maintain this audiovisual delicacy while sketching these protagonists with slightly more detail than what bluish gives us. Visual presentation and the minimalism of the compositions sometimes means it takes a few beats to realize which person we’re now spending time with. Maybe the blurriness is part of the point - depression so strong it waters your identity down til you’re indistinguishable from a stranger - but it never feels dramatically satisfying. One might argue the film could pull it off with just one character, and leave the other on the cutting room floor.

Antonia de la Luz Kasik’s camera, in service of Czernovsky and Kraxner’s own sensitivities and visual ideas, is the film’s greatest asset. She bathes Austria in jewel-tone blues while paying tremendous attention to the intensity and diffusion of light, relishing in the tactility of literally every surface. Shot duration and camera placement are instrumental to making the film’s prismatic grief varied and tangible, and to suggest all of the insights we gleam about the two leads. Shallow focus is used for character detail and real beauty, if you can believe it. The film’s major visual diversions, mainly a burnished, inky midnight and sharp whites, meld perfectly with the many different shades of blue. It’s hard to imagine any version of bluish that would work without such astutely judged cinematography to make its protracted, poignant loneliness come alive.