Cannes at Home: We're Back!

by Cláudio Alves

Could SOUND OF FALLING be the first German film to win the Palme since THE WHITE RIBBON?

As the title says, we're back! Well, I'm back, to be precise. Apologies for my absence in the last few weeks, but I've been busy, here in Portugal, covering the IndieLisboa Film Festival. Indeed, I might still write something about the many great works I caught there for The Film Experience readership. But, in the meantime, my attention shall be on Cannes and batting away the cinephile FOMO that befalls those of us who're staying home, watching from afar as some of the year's most anticipated films make their bow at the Croisette. Nick Taylor is doing some anniversary posting while Elisa Giudici is reporting from the festivities, so I'll be doing my usual schtick and explore past works from this edition's Official Competition auteurs. 

A few days of competition screenings have passed. Still, it all started with German director Mascha Schilinski's Sound of Falling, which received sterling reviews from international critics and is already considered a contender for end-of-the-festival honors. Sergei Loznitsa's Two Prosecutors marks a more unheralded return to fiction from the Ukrainian filmmaker. Let's look at their triumphs from years past…

DARK BLUE GIRL (2017) Mascha Schilinski

The opening of Mascha Schilinski's feature film debut is a treasure trove of powerful images blasted into the audience's consciousness. There's an introduction, the off-screen voice of parents announcing their separation to Luca, their six-year-old daughter. While this happens somewhere beyond the camera's purview, we peer down a ravine into the crashing waves and a cobalt blue sea. It's mesmerizing, and then, we're off to the races, a flurry of movements that's almost hallucinatory if not for the precision of every frame, condensing what could have taken a whole other movie to tell in a mere four minutes. We learn much about a little girl's heartbreak as she sees her parents' relationship reach its end, the freedom and oppression of a beachy landscape, both a catalyst to despair and an imperfect catharsis made of stone and salt. 

Two years later, a new normal was born from the shipwreck of that divorce, but that too is about to be disrupted. Dark Blue Girl shifts gears after its opening gesture, settling into more conventional cinematic idioms, so typical of European realist drama. The style is loose, but the performances upon which the picture is built denounce a deliberate focus on how parental dynamics barely rebuilt are negotiated within the family. For example, Luca is an observant child, precocious, though not clichéd in her precociousness. Most of all, she is concerned for a father whose health is in jeopardy and a mother who doesn't seem to care, perchance protecting herself by keeping distance. A moment of near heart attack spikes the filial anxiety and introduces a leitmotiv that's among the film's more forceful quirks. A CGI bubble effect, animal symbolism and the overbearing soundtrack are the other notable examples. 

And yet, a heart attack seems less shocking than the scene when Luca finds her parents kissing. They've come together at the old vacation home, which is to be sold, eager to say their goodbyes to the place and celebrate the girl's eighth birthday in its idyll. But, to the sound of scraping solitude, broken bonds are temporarily rebound, a terrifying prospect that the camera spies in what feels like a transgressive violation of the characters' intimacy. Or that sentiment is just a product of how attuned Schilinski is to her little protagonist, played by a remarkable pre-breakthrough Helena Zengel. Beyond a nightmare sequence, the girl's psychology is seldom exteriorized in clear terms. However, the actress is brilliant at flashing these desperate smiles that feel like Liza Minnelli's final number in Cabaret sounds. Like someone trying to convince themselves of the emotion they're performing for an audience.

In Zengel's expression and Schilinski's insightful observations, Dark Blue Girl becomes that kind of film which makes you remember the particular sadness that children feel, a taste of melancholy we tend to forget as we grow beyond those years of innocence. By dramatizing the closing of a material space and an emotional chapter, this director reopens feelings of childhood lost, wounds that never scarred over. Somehow, she makes these clearer, though no less mysterious or painful. The paradox is the tension between perspectives, the three leads who consider each other and the space in starkly different terms. By the end, the door closes on the house and another life these characters might have lived. That sense of finality is what's most impactful about the premise and what it means to everyone involved. Hence the doubt, the reconnection, the reenactment of shatterings already lived, already overcome…or not.

Sadly, Dark Blue Girl isn't streaming anywhere at the moment. Look out for it when new streaming releases are announced. It's worth it.

IN THE FOG (2012) Sergei Loznitsa

Adapted from a Vasili Bykov's novel, In the Fog is its director's first foray into cinema of literary origin. Indeed, its propensity for narrative cul-de-sacs and interruptive flashbacks belies a structure that oft feels more tied to the page than the screen. Not that Loznitsa's work is, in any way, uncinematic. No film of such striking imagery and carefully considered camerawork could be accused of those audiovisual sins. If anything, the friction between a technique honed on non-fiction filmmaking with a text unconcerned with adhering to screenwriting convention makes for an engaging experience. One that perpetually feels on the edge, as if electrified by some unknown charge, restless even when still. It's a wild current that's about to disturb a river's surface, but not quite, not yet. Sink into it and be pulled into a muddy grave. Yet, looking from a distance, one could mistake the trap for still water.

Consider the opening shot, one among many instances where Loznitsa shoots an entire scene without a single cut. His early long takes aren't elegant as much as they are keenly observant, embodying a curiosity that stumbles through spaces and faces, half-cowering, half-sneaking a transgressive glance. The hand-held long takes, especially when deployed in relative quiet, suggest a sense of unfathomable tension. While the director's work here is austere to a degree that will alienate many potential viewers, it invokes a sense of suffocating dread in a sick world. And that sickness is war, as In the Fog takes place in 1942, in the frontiers of the USSR during a period of Nazi occupation. More specifically, it's set around a partisan attack whose perpetrators are summarily executed. All except one, Sushenya, whose inexplicable survival makes him an enemy in the eyes of those he once called comrades. 

One night, two partisan men appear at his door, intent on taking him to his death before his assumed treachery can go further. Silence and good manners rule over the sequence, all hushed pretense of normalcy until his wife screams in outrage. Then, the mechanism of the long take reveals its purpose as a modulator of tone, building a crescendo of discomfort until one needs to break the placidity of restraint, if only so they can breathe. This dynamic repeats in a near-cyclical fashion, a clockwork tempo that retracts into the land of memory only to return to a fraught present when allegiances are an enigma. War has rotted away personal bonds and turned the social order of the community into a cancerous mass. Trust is nowhere to be found. Everyone's a traitor in their way, whether in material reality or the collective imagination.

In the fog of war, it's hard to discern who's trying to kill you, who's an ally, and who's an enemy. In the fog, you shoot at whatever moves. When you get closer, you just have to hope it's an enemy you've hit. That fog also produces some remarkable images, the film's latter tableaux shrouded in its silver daze while, earlier passages, look dipped in China ink, so bottomless are the black shadows that cut across bodies and turn the night sky into a void. Romanian DP Oleg Mutu proves he's Loznitsa's most important collaborator regarding the fiction side of his filmography, striking an aesthetic note that's quietly distinct from the auteur's documentary projects, though still indebted to the same sensibilities. The use of warmth at dawn is especially beautiful, as is the way Mutu captures the lead actor's visage. Through the camera's gaze, Vladimir Svirskiy is a Medieval icon by Andrei Rublev, smeared with blood, dirt and a deep sorrow.

In the Fog is streaming on Kanopy. You can also rent and/or purchase it from Amazon Video, Apple TV, and Fandango at Home.

Are you familiar with these directors' work? Loznitsa is my favorite of the pair, but Schinlinski feels very promising. I can't wait to see their latest feats.