The Sound of Żafżifa

Perhaps cinema’s defining trait is its capacity, via a surplus of means, to accomplish the aesthetic state in Schiller’s sense, i.e., the union of supreme agitation and supreme rest. Cinema is the agitation that can always be suspended.
– Jacques Rancière

Alive for so little time, its beauty never realised.
– Żafżifa

In an interview poised between his two major books on cinema, Film Fables (2001) and The Intervals of Cinema (2011), Jacques Rancière attempts to define something that is truly magical in cinema – the magical effect measured by its resonance within us – but achieved wholly through the material register of a shift in tone, level, sense.

He gives the example of Kenji Mizoguchi’s final work Street of Shame (1956), in which there appears, after an intensely melodramatic moment, an unexpected shot of the mother kneeling with her back to the camera. In a subsequent shot, we will come to us understand the narrative and psychological meaning of this gesture and its depiction: the woman has lost her mind. “But there is this moment of rest, which manages, simultaneously, to advance the action and render it indecisive.” This mark of indecision acts as a wedge – a shifter. It suspends the action and engineers a different state or shade of response in us.

There is a particular stylistic device that, in my experience as a cinephile, particularly embodies this effect of a shift that both intensifies and removes us from the ongoing narrative action in a film. It happens on the soundtrack rather than within the mise en scène and editing of the image (as in Rancière’s classic example), while interacting with those variables.

The device to which I’m referring involves the transition between two distinct ways of recording, rendering and mixing the speaking human voice. The first way is live, direct sound recording – ambient, reverberating, a voice necessarily captured within the contingent dynamics of space, place and architecture. The second way is studio recording – clear, controlled, close, technically manipulable. What happens when, mid-scene – even mid-line – a voice crosses over from the first to the second mode of sound? (It can go in the other direction, too, but with a different effect and sense.)

Let me be clear. I am not describing the passage from dialogue to voice-over narration (as in many a film noir in the manner of Double Indemnity [1944]); nor am I alluding to the often clumsy patch-ups of post-sync or ADR (Automated Dialogue Replacement) that punctuate many a live track in movies for the presumed sake of improved vocal-verbal intelligibility.

I am pointing to a far more deliberate effect, for which a film which must carefully prepare the groundwork: when, at a wholly unexpected point in a scene, the speaking voice removes itself to another plane; it becomes purer, more intimate, more poetic. It is intriguing that, in these audio-moments when, in the mix, the timbre and performed delivery of voice metamorphose, we are invariably in the realm of literal poetry – or, at least, a type of recitation or incantation. Even: an inner prayer. It’s something far stranger and more disquieting, harder to place, than a conventional voice-over ‘thought track’.

Terrence Malick’s films since and including The Thin Red Line (1998) carry prime examples of this phenomenon. An outstanding, complex instance of it crowns the final scene of Pascal Bonitzer’s Victor comme tout le monde (2026), when a long-subdued emotion sweeps us up in the switch of the soundtrack to a woman’s reading of a passage by Victor Hugo – its significance now entirely altered in comparison with the narrative events preceding it.

Peter Sant’s Żafżifa (2025) contains a remarkable example of this magical shift in sound. It, too, occurs during the final scene – but has been prepared from the film’s very first moments, which are reprised (differently) on the soundtrack. A man, Dimitrios (Dimitrios Giannakoudakis), and a woman, Helena (Chriselle Medrano), meet up – for the final time, it seems – around an empty swimming pool in the midst of a crumbling ruin. She drops a bag of food on the ground for him, and their movements of apartness trace a melancholic choreography of what-could-have-been but will not, alas, ever gel: their relationship in this precise time and place (Buġibba in contemporary Malta), as they are each blown by the exigent winds of destiny and necessity.

The woman sobs uncontrollably in the foreground of the frame as, in the background, the man sits at the edge of the pool, legs dangling over the side, lost (as we see when the image racks focus) in idle contemplation. Cinephiles like myself will recall the quietly devastating endings of films by Michelangelo Antonioni and Tsai Ming-liang – for the melancholic, unbridgeable distances between bodies in the mise en scène, the geometry of the abandoned urban site, and the unconsolable tears that drop from Helena’s face in close-up.

But it is the sound design of the scene that takes us to another, wholly original level. After the opening lines retained in direct sound (“That’s all I can do for you. It’s over”) punctuated by ambient noises including a plane passing overhead, we transit, by degrees, out of this sonic reality and into a poetic dialogue of souls.

Helena: You died the night they beat you.
Dimitrios: It’s true. My soul went to Hades that night. And since then, never once did the breeze refuse to blow, deflecting me from my true course. Yet still, I made for home.
Helena: The winds will take us when it’s our time.
Dimitrios: Will the winds ever bring us together again?

Let’s reverse back to the very start of the film, since certain phrases from this final recitation are initially heard there – as yet unmoored, unattached to any visible, identifiable, named characters. The opening sequence of images is mysterious: a nocturnal view of apartments, their interiors gleaming – burning, almost – with a brown-yellow light. The sound is multiply-layered: the voices; musical (but not melodic) washes of sound; and street noise (dogs, passing traffic) – that builds into a treated cacophony of thunderous construction, banging, clanging. In this first minute, we have passed through so many registers: the spectral image is lent, in turn, to poetry, to realism, and to expressionistic nightmare. This is the characteristic nature of the sound of Żafżifa.

Then it is time for a story to be conjured. Dimitrios returns to this seaside town after six or seven years away. But the return is not a homecoming. He is a permanent exile who feels at home nowhere: not where he’s born, and not wherever he’s been, either. His previous connection to a wife and child are largely shattered; a previous lover in a fine home treats him with little indulgence. Friends from the past come and go, across an assortment of shops and bars; as Jesse Winchester once sang: your friends will pity you (I guess that’s what your friends are for), but they’ll leave you where they find you when they find you on the floor.

There is a trauma in Dimitrios’ past that the film alludes to and flashes in hallucinatory, zoom-lens glimpses: his body dumped somewhere, three menacing shadows … but the precise substance of that intrigue are deliberately withheld from us. Żafżifa moves gradually toward a tentative new relationship – one that may offer the hope of a future – between Dimitrios and Helena, whom he encounters by chance. The weight of the world, however, proves too much for this fragile connection to bear. In its own, precisely chiselled way, the film is a muted melodrama – that is, if we understand melodrama not as an overwrought, theatricalised genre of excessive, violently demonstrative passions (Sirk, Minnelli, Visconti, Fassbinder, Haynes), but precisely as “a series of misunderstandings … out of sync, too soon, too late, the right thing at the wrong place, or vice versa” (Thomas Elsaesser), and encounters that are marked by “bad timing” for people who figure as “cultural anachronisms, left behind by time and History” (Sam Rohdie). Missed connections; impossible rendezvous.

I have written about Sant’s previous feature, Of Time and the Sea (2018), elsewhere. That film shaped its style to minimalist abstraction and allegory – immeasurably aided in this cause by its location, a sparsely populated island of Malta. Its characters have names like Girl in Orange and Sousaphone Man, and their largely unpsychologised interactions take place in a Kafkaesque cycle of daily entropy. Żafżifa plunges us into a totally different cinematic world. It is, one one level, a densely realist work: the sights and sounds of this city are palpably recorded and rendered, in visual compositions that unerringly find architectural lines and shapes in even the drabbest chance arrangement of half-built projects and forlorn residues. It’s an extraordinary mix of languages and cultures: Filipino, Indian, Nigerian, European, Pakistani … we glimpse a palimpsest of various religions with their modes of worship, along with an ‘Online Live Casino Academy’! The fact that Sant is working with non-professional actors clinches a link with the great tradition of Italian neo-realism.

We are invited to observe a contemporary location in perpetual construction and reconstruction – reflecting waves of influence exerted by tourism and other overarching economic factors. Just as Dimitrios is an individual with his self rooted nowhere, this city itself constitutes a type of no-place – full of congestion and activity, movement and street-level intrigue (“There’s a lot happening right now”, opportunities everywhere, as somebody insists), but never cohering into a central identity, its fragments flying off in every direction. One of many emblems of this reality is the inflatable castle in a makeshift playground area; as it deflates, we see the real buildings of the city behind it. Another emblem is the dodgem car arena (a memory of Bresson’s Mouchette [1967]?) that Dimitrios minds and at one point even enjoys himself, in the faint memory of some teenage courtship ritual …

Beyond the undoubted richness of the image-track (shot by Sant himself), however, it is the shifts and transitions realised by the soundtrack that complicate any sense of a simple, transparent, documentary realism. When the voices of the lovers register on another plane, we experience an aesthetic phenomenon reminiscent of what Gilberto Perez found in Godard’s Vivre sa vie (1962): a way of articulating, in the imbrication and interrelation of content and form, “the possibilities of love and freedom, the difficulties of power and prevailing circumstance” – where the possibilities arise from the form (sound), and the difficulties are inscribed in the content (image). This is, in Perez’s terms, an interplay of lyricism and pathos: the heightened, expressive possibilities of cinema itself in a ceaseless, mortal combat with the heavy misery of our modern world. His words help to illuminate, too, the gem-like complexity of Żafżifa.

In the end, the film, song and story and everything else, asks to be taken figuratively, allegorically: the lyricism celebrates the triumph, the pathos laments the defeat of the soul that would assert itself, the tenderness that would gain embodiment, the freedom that would achieve realisation on the ground of recognised necessity.

© Adrian Martin April 2026