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Tender
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Linda Manz from Days of Heaven (1978) and Out of the Blue (1980) died in August
2020. But is her spirit reincarnated in the 11 year-old Mia Desmoulin of Tender?
Mia relentlessly probes her 15 year-old friend Hugo (Mercier)
about his relationship with another girl, Chaïnes (Bizot) – I inscribe their
names that way because these people are, more or less, playing themselves, in a
confusion of documentary and fictional registers typical of a particular thread
in 21st century cinema.
The exact, explanatory details of this strange,
interpersonal triangle matter less to director Isabel Pagliai (Isabella Morra, 2015) than the brute
reality of faces, voices, physical gestures, and the lakeside setting.
Switched-on cinephiles may find themselves
free-associating to the works of Bruno Dumont, Maurice Pialat, Val Massadian, Catherine
Breillat, Harmony Korine, Alain Guiraudie, Philippe Grandrieux. Pagliai’s
method, however, is on the severe end of this scale: ellipses between scenes,
leaps across time, darkness, and the ever-present use of what is either
off-screen or too far away for us to clearly see. We must work as spectators to
make any sense of these fragments.
The certainty of the cinematic style speaks, in a
paradoxical way, to the uncertain status of the relationships we fleetingly
witness here: ambiguous exchanges that waver between infantilism and adulthood,
affection and violence, innocent friendship and erotic intimacy.
Like in a Larry Clark movie,
what these “kids” spontaneously do may determine the rest of their lives – but
they can only live in the moment.
Tender is a striking 43-minute piece,
and Pagliai is a talent to watch.
© Adrian Martin September 2020 |
