It is a recurring phenomenon when one goes to film festivals: the impression that a secret solidarity holds certain films between them, that filmmakers from all walks of life have decided to dig the same path without having concerted. This year, at the Marseille International Film Festival (FID), which took place from July 19 to 25, we felt two trends. One, centrifugal, projected films, documentaries and fictions outwards, not without, in passing, exploding their forms, the only way to approach everything that is behind the expression. “State of the world” and that the cinema tries to catch up, formulate, clarify: confinement, the “yellow vests”, the deaths in the Mediterranean, the youth who militate, the uprising of peoples.
The other, centripetal, returned to the interior, houses and apartments occupied by female characters during their stay: the women open a door and settle in a place to be tamed which is none other than the movie time. So with Cas, the heroine of the film Topology of Sirens, graceful and erudite first film by the American Jonathan Davies, who settles in with his dead aunt and leads a Rivettian investigation, devoured by his obsession for sound matter.
She could have come across the heroine of Haruhara San’s Recorder, by Kioshi Sugita, a film that does not bother with any investigation, preferring the amplitude of everyday life, the scansion of hours and meals, the repeated wait in front of a kettle. A film that materializes the dull and deep joy that we sometimes feel when we are deprived of intrigue, but also its reverse: the crossing of a dispassionate, white time, located outside the march of the world. A shot, moreover, came back like a rhyme in all these centripetal films: the faces of sleeping women. The cinema then becomes this shelter in which to rest from events.
Female loneliness
Beatrix, signed by Austrians Lilith Kraxner and Milena Czernovsky, is another sanctuary, inspired by a short story by Ingeborg Bachmann, where the heroine of the same name oscillates between two activities: looking at herself in the mirror and sleeping. In the wake of Jeanne Dielman, by Chantal Akerman, the film attempts to travel through this dark continent of female solitude, so close, sometimes, to madness: what happens when a young woman is not observed? What does she do with her day? She cleans the sink, vacuums, doesn’t get dressed, doesn’t wax, watches TV or vacuum and forgets to read. Through a series of still shots, Beatrix attempts a repertoire of all the postures of the woman alone, and confined. So much so that, when she invites a man, it is Beatrix’s own body and space that is disturbed: you have to wax, dress, tidy up, put an open book in evidence – prepare the spectacle of the woman being watched. In this space for oneself, men can only be intruders, and loneliness appears like a prayer that has just been interrupted.
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