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Tomorrow We Move
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Co-author: Cristina Álvarez López
Almost Singing, Almost Dancing
Tomorrow We Move (2004) is Chantal Akerman’s most underrated film. An appalling
“tribute” to the director by Robert Koehler in Cineaste magazine (Winter 2016) dismissed most of her work in
fiction filmmaking beyond the 1970s, and was especially down on those fictions
involving music, comedy, love, passion and obsession.
So, into the bin go Night and Day (1991, unmentioned in Koehler’s article), Golden Eighties (1986, “dated and silly”), The Captive (2000, “elephantine, imitative, and strangely fake”),
and Almayer’s Folly (2011, sunk by that
“terrible French actor Stanislas Merhar”!). And Tomorrow we Move? It and A Couch in New York (1996) are merely “exercises that Akerman had to get out of her system”.
Let’s start again.
There is frequently an element of self-portraiture in
Akerman’s work, but probably never so frankly as in Tomorrow We Move. Sylvie Testud plays Charlotte, a writer finding
it difficult to crank out her commissioned, erotic prose. Chain-smoking,
clumsy, eternally scatty and distracted, Charlotte is a human sponge: whatever
she sees and (especially) hears goes straight into whatever she’s typing. Those
around her burst into laughter at one glimpse of her “comic” attempts at
describing sex. “Comic?”, she keeps asking herself at unexpected intervals.
Comedy, sensuality, hard work, mess, cooking, chaos, and
above all the constant presence of music: everything flows, buzzes and
intersects in this portrait of everyday life.
It’s a film that the philosopher Spinoza could have
dreamed up, because everything here is a matter of swiftly fluctuating moods,
sensations, inputs that instantly alter people and the way they see and
experience their surroundings.
Akerman – much to the chagrin of her co-writer, Eric
de Kuyper – insisted on incorporating even those familial memories of the
Holocaust that haunt much of her œuvre, deepening the prevailing “lightness”
and airiness of the piece. Akerman had, indeed, a lot to “get out of her
system”!
The English title gives the film a pun it lacks in the
original French, but fully deserves. “We move”: the reference is to moving
house, relocating oneself; Akerman had already used it once before in the 40
minute monologue-piece, Le Déménagement (Moving In, 1992), which (recalling Michael
Snow’s Wavelength [1967]) slowly
creeps into an extreme close-up of Sami Frey amidst the unpacked boxes of his
life.
But there is another type of movement that is
incessant here: the physical movement of walking, rushing, gesturing, dancing.
Like in a musical, everyone is inevitably enchanted (even when they wish not to be), everybody sways to the rhythm – but the
relations between music, dance and action remain loose, mutually autonomous.
In our audiovisual essay Almost Singing, Almost Dancing, we concentrate on this almost-musical aspect of the film: not
the seamless fusion of song and movement aspired to in a film like La La Land (2016), but a tapestry of
mobile levels and elements, more in the vein of Jacques Rivette’s great Up Down Fragile (1995).
MORE Akerman: Chantal Akerman par Chantal Akerman, Les Rendez-vous d’Anna, Saute ma ville © Cristina Álvarez López & Adrian Martin February 2017 |
