The opinion of the “World” – To see
A certain internationality within auteur cinema resists the globalized acceleration of images by, on the contrary, widening the duration of shots, sometimes to the extreme. When it is not a question of a vain performance, it sometimes produces a singular poetry, a hypnosis which suspends the usual slaughter of the narrative for an aesthetic of slow revelation, a tenfold attention to sensory events.
It is precisely in this vein that The tree, third feature film by Portuguese director André Gil Mata, born in 1978. So we won’t be really surprised to learn that the man was the pupil of Bela Tarr (Satantango, in 1994, The Turin Horse, in 2011), a Hungarian master of epic lengths, from which he takes up almost feature by feature the long stretches of time.
Historical short circuit
Shot in Bosnia and Herzegovina, The tree crosses the path of two characters: an old man who, at night, under the distant fire of snipers, carries spring water for the inhabitants of a sleeping village; and an orphan boy who seeks shelter to sleep, trying not to cross the road of the occupying army.
The film, which could have slipped into the miserable nature of the subject or the formalist arrogance, escapes both by joining the territory of the tale.
As the two of them traverse wintery expanses carpeted in snow, their encounter suggests that they might be one and the same, at two separate times in his life. An encounter which also gives rise to a historical short-circuit between two armed conflicts, the Second World War and the Bosnian War, which awaken the same ghosts through the corridors of time.
The tree, who could have fallen into the miserable nature of the subject or the formalist arrogance, escapes both by joining the territory of the tale. Opening onto the pensive image of a child drawing on the mist of a window in front of a snow-covered village, he seems to have completely escaped from a dream.
More than its temporal “twist”, ultimately anecdotal, its beauty lies above all in the crossing that it organizes through nocturnal and disturbing spaces, haunted by fantastic shadows and spectral lights, which open up to characters like legendary labyrinths. The chiaroscuro photography and the soundtrack welcoming a symphony of muffled rustles, participate in this same and sumptuous hallucination.
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