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Talking to Strangers
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Talking to Strangers is a film of nine long-take sequences, usually quite elaborately staged, utilising direct sound recording (Altman-style: microphones in diverse places, mixed up or down as events proceed) and shot in 35mm. That puts it in a lineage after Jerzy Skolimowski’s jazzy Walkover (1965) and before Ana Poliak’s early-digital film The Faith of the Volcano (2001). In all these works (among many others that use the long take less systematically or structurally), what’s at stake for the spectator is the effect that Jean-Luc Godard admired in Talking to Strangers (he had already championed, in its day, Walkover): the way markers of fiction and reality (or, in a similar formulation, fiction and documentary – or, according to Woody Allen in Manhattan Murder Mystery [1993], “art and life”) dance around another, sometimes coalescing and sometimes parting ways. Fiction as in strong, imaginary, spectacular events happening to the characters; reality as in a flowing duration of time, words and gestures and movements simply falling into place with seeming, everyday randomness. Fiction tightens things up; reality lets them disperse. In truth, Tregenza leans more to the fiction side of this equation than Godard might have wished. Talking to Strangers is a story of sorts – there’s a central, threading figure, Jesse (Ken Gruz), who calls himself a writer and appears in every scene – but a discontinuous narrative in the sense that nothing at all, no other person or intrigue, carries over from one unit to the next (t’s like the semi-seriality of certain TV shows in that respect). In fact, Tregenza built that discontinuity factor into a veritable dispositif worthy of Lars von Trier in the 2000s: apart from scene 1 (shot from high up and far away, where Jesse may be waiting for someone to get off a bus, or he’s just checking out every bus that arrives) and scene 9 (the weakest of the lot, where Jesse spray-paints a room, and eventually the camera lens itself, in a pale shade – an ultra-slow fade-to-white performed as conceptual art), the ultimately edited scene order was set randomly by a computer. The acting is hit-and-miss, and the level of intensity in the situations is deliberately varied: sometimes it’s just an obsessed person, someone Jesse can’t get rid of, banging on and on; in one case, it’s a sudden explosion of ‘urban violence’ on a bus, like the bloody, interracial confrontation that intrudes into Masculin féminin (1965), surely an influence here – like Godard, Tregenza discreetly shoves the worst horrors of rape and murder deep into the background, off-screen, or elides them in the cut while a sound effect blasts away. The title says exactly what the film is, and what it explores: encounters with strangers, some of them frazzled (a nun on board a boat who seems to take great exception to Jesse’s banal questions), some familiar (Jesse’s argument with his lover), some weirdly hypnotic (like the old, well-dressed guy in the place that serves food to the homeless). Discontinuity rules at this level, too: there’s never any ‘carry over’ of affective relations from one space (office, street, vessel, church confessional … ) to the next. Jesse himself remains a mystery (or a black hole) to us, professionally and psychologically; anomie rules. It’s all fairly superficial stuff on the thematic plane, but it works OK. You keep hearing that Randy Newman song from 1977 in your head: Oh, Baltimore, man, it’s hard just to live … There’s a general technical proficiency to the blocking and framing that, while not exactly registering as ‘slick’ (Tregenza has done much advertising work), certainly raises Talking to Strangers to a level above many a rough-hewn independent feature. The mixture of ‘amateur dramatical’ ambience and avant-gardism reminded me somewhat of Jon Jost’s fictional films – and, in the burgeoning late ‘80s context of indie-arthouse ascension, placed Talking to Strangers in an odd, uncomfortable spot equidistant from the underground New York No Wave and the Soderbergh/Sayles/Seidelman crowd-pleasers. Most intriguing and salutary of all – especially when seen after decades of televisual mise en scène grabbing the Cassavetes/Dardennes/Mumblecore/Noé ‘follow close behind the actor barrelling along’ technique and flattening it into a bland manner – is the way Tregenza has the camera move. It never directly follows the actors (who are almost constantly on the hop, at least when not nailed into a fixed seating arrangement); it moves across, around, sometimes out a little, in order to reframe the action from a different vantage point, a different perspective. This gives a refreshing rhythm and respiration to even the most trying bits of confrontational business. Bodies get the opportunity to exit and re-enter the frame in a leisurely way; scenes begin and end with contemplative views of the city environment. There’s a degree of gracefulness in this aesthetic determination. © Adrian Martin 13 June 2024 |
