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Un lac
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If you start a film festival (this one was Las Palmas
in 2009) – not at the Opening Night Gala, but the very first screening that
afternoon – with Philippe Grandrieux’s Un
lac, you hardly need watch anything else; you may as well go home after
that. But, strangely – the way these things happen at festivals – the film set
a tone, or a theme, that captured many subsequent screenings in its net: the
archetypal situation of the whole event became the too-close relations of a
family (not necessarily a traumatised or Gothic family, it could even be a
Happy Family) – parent-child, or sibling intimacy – interrupted and reorganised
by an incoming stranger.
Un lac is not a violent film the way
Grandrieux’s previous features, Sombre (1998) and La Vie Nouvelle (2002), were: no serial rape, prostitution
or socially-sanctioned abuse. The filmmaker announced, in Zagreb at the end of
2007, that he was through with the Gothic themes of malign evil and the perverse:
henceforth, his work would only be about joy. (Let’s see if he sticks to that
promise in future!) Un lac is a
sublime film about, not uncomplicated joy exactly, but the exquisite pain of a
transition: the daughter (Natalie Rehorova) must leave her home, the sister
must leave her brother, and she must do so in the arms of her newfound lover.
The plot of the piece amounts to not much more than that, with this almost
Hitchcockian ethical twist or transference: the stranger (Alexei Solonchev),
whom the brother (Dmitry Kubasov) at first seems disposed to hate with all his
might, actually saves the latter’s life after he suffers an epileptic fit. So,
a debt of trust and love intervenes, easing the way to the affective handover.
The power of Un
lac comes from the way it pictures and figures this womb or cocoon of the
primal family. There is not the slightest realistic detail in the film on the
level of its narrative verisimilitude: here is a family in a cabin in the snow,
completely cut off from the entire world, from time and history. The young man
chops and fells trees: that’s it for a vocation, employment, money, whatever.
Issues of language, regionality, cultural specificity: forget ‘em. Realism
questions (when, where, how come?) count for nothing here; the movie compels us
to accept its extraordinary abstraction and subtraction from the ordinary
world.
What we see is, on the one hand, brute nature (the
cold, the ice, the mountains, the barely-glimpsed lake of the valley, the sound
of the wind gently shaking the giant trees) and, on the other hand, the sensual
embodiment of human drives and desires: has any film started so powerfully as
this one does, with the boy’s chopping of a tree (apparently the post-sync, sonic
composite of twenty different noises)? That is, in a sense, Un lac’s true subject: the channelling
of desire, the taming of the drives. From the indistinctness of the family womb
– in an extraordinarily brave artistic gesture, Grandrieux films the home
interior with almost no discernible detail of rooms, contours, spaces, volumes,
except for a dining table here or a bed there in the darkness – to the forging
of a necessary (and necessarily sexual) relation to the Other.
There is no obvious sign of a radical political agenda
here – of the kind that slightly overbalanced the presentation of Eastern
Europe as a setting in La Vie Nouvelle,
determining a large part of what was written about it in its defence – but Un lac is stronger for its absence. The
film marks an extraordinary purification of Grandrieux’s art, and a better coming-to-account with the impulse to tell a
story, which is arrived at here minimally and mythically – with some strikingly
classical moments, such as the rhyming movement of the camera, out on the
water, into and out of the shore from which boats arrive and depart (such a
central pinpoint spot in this fable!). Reminiscent again of Grandrieux in Zagreb,
hearing (unforgettably) him explain the fold of the start to the end in Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995) …
One can smother Grandrieux’s films with all the
culture one brings to them: cinematic references (F.W. Murnau, Andrei Tarkovsky,
Werner Herzog, Stan Brakhage), pictorial (Caspar David Friedrich, Turner, John
Martin), literary-poetic (Georg Trakl, Adalbert Stifter) – including,
naturally, his own previous works. Yes, the camera shakes, trembles, lingers
long out-of-focus; yes, the darkness reigns; yes, dialogue is sparse and
elemental (“You don’t know who I am” / “But I know what I want from you”); yes,
the entirely constructed soundscape is again all-important, this incredible bed of aural sensations and layers. And
there is indeed one, sole moment of cultural reference in the film itself: the
breathtaking birth of music (in a film with, otherwise, no score), first as a
voice, then (uncannily) with piano accompaniment, this performance of a Robert Schumann Liederkreis which comes out of
nowhere and marks a very precise moment of transition in the film: “Your voice
is not the same anymore”, says brother to sister. That passage alone sends Un lac (and me) to heaven.
But one has to resist this assimilation of Un lac to previously known or
experienced co-ordinates. The film lives in the viewer to the extent that it
offers, one after another, a series of first-time visions (and sounds). The
gradual revealing of the family members is structured for just this impact and
effect: suddenly, there is a mother, a stranger, a father … and don’t forget
the horse, who is just as significant a character here. To really feel this
movie is to be struck by all this virginity: the freshness of air, of skin (how
made-up and artificial the skin in every other movie looks after this one!), of
every posture and gesture … Grandrieux lines up a study of the human body, and
in particular the body in a particular position: with the head up, the neck
exposed, and the eyes open or closed, looking at trees, listening into the
distance, feeling the falling snowflakes on one’s hair and face. That was the
ambiguous pose at the end of La Vie Nouvelle,
too, poised between angst and rebirth, contorted in a cosmic scream; but here,
it’s a serene trance, the look of love.
On the closing night of this festival where I first encountered
it, Un lac won awards for cinematography
and innovation. I had the special thrill of reading out this speech sent by
Philippe via SMS:
I thank the Grand Jury of the Las Palmas Film Festival for having
awarded two prizes to Un lac. And I
am happy they will be delivered into Adrian’s good hands. I am also very happy
that these awards come from a country that I especially love. Light and
innovation: what a beautiful definition of cinema, of its vitality and greatest
energy. I am unable to attend the Festival, because my film is being released
in France in a few days – but, despite the distance that sadly separates me
from you this evening, I joyfully accept these prizes at the very same instant
that you give them to me, because they are coming from Las Palmas to Paris
carried at the speed of light: the light of cinema, which is the light that
illuminates all our lives. Thank you once again,
Philippe Grandrieux
© Adrian Martin March/April 2009 |
