In 1954, William Burroughs wrote that “Tangier is a vast overstocked market, everything for sale and no buyers.” Half a century later, circumstances in the city may have changed, but that same sentiment finds itself modulated by a cab driver as he tosses a portentous glance to Badia (Soufia Issami) and tells her that “Tangier only gives to foreigners.” The protagonist of Moroccan writer-director Leila Kilani’s On the Edge, Badia is a young woman who’s moved from Casablanca to Tangier to make a living. Hoping one day to land a job in the more prestigious factories of the city’s Free Zone, we see her at work in a less glamorous shrimp processing facility, where the sterile whitespace is marred by the orangish slime and grime of piles of shrimp shells. That kind of grime permeates the film and the dingy, noirish urban environments that Badia wends her way through.
Badia isn’t a personable or empathetic character, but as the driving force of the story, her behavior is a fascinating display. She seems continuously possessed by a hyperactive, twitchy nervousness, and her thoughts come across to us not via the steady drip of personal reflection, but in salvos, through internal and external monologues that serve as bursts of consciousness from a stormy mind. Everyone around her can sense the jagged edges of her personality; at work she’s told that she may have mastered all the parts of the process, but “you don’t fit in with the other girls.” She’s well aware of this, and doesn’t plan to stick around; she has other goals in mind. The web of intrigue that drives the film comes from the other side of her life; in the evenings she goes out with her friend, Imane (Mouna Bahmad), parties with strange men, and then steals from them. On one of these encounters they meet another pair of girls, the thievery escalates, and complications ensue inside and outside the Free Zone.
On paper the structure resembles something approaching a crime or heist film (the specter of the “one big score” is even invoked), but Kilani confounds expectations by enveloping us in the intensity of Badia’s subjectivity. The film lurches into manic, frenetic passages of Badia in action: When she eats, she shoves bread and milk into her mouth because the time demanded by a leisurely meal is outside her consideration—or she’s frantically scrubbing her skin raw, trying to get the stench of shrimp off her. If we received a sense of the bigger picture, we might see the petty stakes underlying Badia’s world. But that big picture is a luxury she doesn’t have, and neither do we. Instead we’re plunged through the narrowness and claustrophobia of crowded nighttime streets where the people are as invisible to Badia as she is to them.
These techniques effectively produce the destruction of geography and dislocate us in space. We sense the importance of the Free Zone and the corporations within, and the threat of gangland retribution by Badia’s targets lurks at the edges of the story. But if these places feel disconnected, and the people escape our full understanding, then we might begin to see the world as Badia does, through the surety of objects. Whether it’s a bucket of shrimp or a crate of iPhones, to take or have or lose these things is what matters. Burroughs also wrote that “Tangier is running down like the dying universe, where no movement is possible because all energy is equally distributed.” Here, Kilani gives us a portrait of a woman rebelling against that state of affairs, driven by ambition and desperation; in the Tangier that we see, those two seem like the same thing.
The first image of Thai writer-director Kongdej Jaturanrasmee’s P-047 irises in from a milky haze toward an enigma: two men in white gloves, sitting and swirling wine in their glasses as they listen to Debussy. They’re in a house that doesn’t belong to them. They’ve broken in, but they aren’t thieves in the traditional sense. They inhabit the lives of the owners for a brief respite, and then they leave, eliminating all traces that they were ever there. They are, of course, uniquely skilled for the crime: Lek (Parinya Kwamwongwan) is a locksmith who can pick any lock, except for the retinal scan ones you see in the movies, he tells his partner Kong (Aphichai Trakulphadejkrai), who has an eye for detail, honed from his time working continuity on movie sets (he’s the one obsessed with Debussy; maybe “this song is about the girl of your dreams,” he tells a blank-faced Lek).
For a long while, Jaturanrasmee is content to let us wander with the pair, their designs not driven by a sense of urgency, but by an emptiness that’s never spelled out. It’s merely evoked by the negative space that haunts the film’s compositions. Daily routine and rhythm come to a standstill as Lek and Kong break in, and the film captures the stasis—the quality of frozen time—of a house that’s empty, that might as well not exist when we’re not in it. Of the pair, Kong is flip and joking, but Lek is possessed by a melancholy that seems to fill the empty spaces. “There is nothing good about my life,” Lek announces.
As the narrative hops and skips across time and space, it’s as if we’ve been asked to explore the ramifications of that statement. Information is parceled out to us through memories and nested flashbacks and jumps in subjectivity. A random character seemingly stumbles her way into the story, a woman with a pathological urge to sniff things, and as she tells Lek a tale about going to a hotel and realizing “this room already had an owner,” the story is helpfully illustrated by a cutaway slideshow. Techniques like the intrusion of other voices and other texts (as in text that literally forces its way onto the image) signal that Lek may have one of the more privileged viewpoints, but he’s in a film unafraid to wander away from him and trace thematic and syntactic connections wherever they might lead. It’s a story in a state of transmutation.
That narrative sensibility is complemented by Jaturanrasmee’s visual sense, lingering on open and sparse compositions. Like the way Lek and Kong seem to step into frozen time when they break in, these frames take on a kind of abstraction, rendering familiar domestic spaces into arcs and nested panels and swatches of color. The sum of these techniques results in a dispassionate film driven by intellectual curiosity rather than emotional resonance. Yet even within that framework, the film finds the poetry in small moments: the feathers of a peacock, or the points of light that make up a dead man’s memories. The film has an ethos that matches its style in that it’s not bluntly hammered, but instead teased out in the middle of an oblique conversation. Kong’s reading The Bourne Identity, and he takes issue with the redemptive, closed-off ending. “Maybe he doesn’t want to remember,” he muses.
Chinese-Burmese filmmaker Midi Z takes a similar detachment, with open framings and open storylines, in Return to Burma, but they are put to quite different ends. Here, we proceed from the shadow of a dense Taiwanese metropolis to the rural Burmese countryside as we follow construction worker Xing-hong (Wang Shin-Hong), returning home with his friend Rong’s ashes. On the journey back, Xing-hong hears songs on the radio that announce the approach of democratic elections and the hope for a new Burma which Rong never had a chance to see.
Midi Z paints with fine strokes the nuances and multitudes of tiny adjustments that accompany a return home after a long time away; after 12 years, Xing-hong finds himself in familiar yet altered surroundings, and he works his way through the slow process of re-entry into his community. He’s asked to give an inspirational speech at his old school, where he passes on the lesson that “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” His mother wonders if he still remembers home, and as they eat dates, he tells her, “This date is indeed sweeter than before.” Here, the ties of family and the memories of childhood create a framework for the film.
Even though we spend so much time with him, Xing-hong is a difficult figure to access. He’s closed off, neither affectless nor overly passionate. We understand the way he thinks through the questions he asks once he’s back home, all revolving around the income of people and the prices of things. Through it, we get a sense of Burma’s place not geographically, but economically: the disparity of Xing-hong’s income to those back home is stark, and bound up with his questions is also the question of the worth of a person’s life, whether in Burma or somewhere else. It’s implicit in the death of Rong, which underlies the entire film; it’s also made explicit with a discussion on the price of prostitutes in a scene that both Xing-hong and the film treat with characteristically dispassionate directness.
Also on his mind is the provenance of things in the wake of a global interconnectedness that’s embedded itself even in Burma. The film presents a place where goods flow in from other countries, and in return Burma sends people out into the world. A sister in China, a brother going to Malaysia—many of the people that Xing-hong encounters are planning to move abroad, or at least dream of doing so. Meanwhile, as he asks the price and details of goods, he’s also told that they were imported. A machine that processes peanut oil was made in China, “but the filter was made in Burma,” the owner helpfully adds. The pastoral rhythm adopted by the film has the effect of giving those discussions the sense of contemplating not other countries but other planets.
With that measured pace, the film feels like it’s in a perpetual state of rest, holding in wide static compositions where neither the camera nor the characters are in motion and where action is dissipated. Conflict, if it’s on display at all, is submerged under layers of reserve or displaced into the irrevocable past. This static, controlled approach highlights the kinetic energy that does appear when Xing-hong finds himself in motion, riding in trucks or buses or on motorcycles. In these moments, Midi Z captures the essence of the loneliness of long-distance and international travel, where you might be moving through the world but the overwhelming feeling is that the world is moving around you.
The themes of childhood subjectivity and international boundaries recurring throughout the Los Angeles Film Festival find their intersection in The First Man, a Franco-Italian-Algerian co-production written and directed by Gianni Amelio. Adapted from the unfinished novel by Albert Camus, the film centers on the writer (and clear Camus surrogate) Jacques Cormery (Jacques Gamblin) as he travels from France to the land of his birth: Algeria, which in the 1950s is wracked by violent political strife between the French government and the Arab independence movement. It’s through this turbulent milieu that Cormery reconnects with his elderly mother, Catherine (Catherine Sola), reflects on his pied-noir childhood growing up in Algiers, and confronts the bifurcated nature of his personal and political identities.
Amelio conveys this through a comfortable flashback structure, following Cormery as he visits old locales and familiar faces, in which the power of place transports us back to the 1920s. There we see the younger Cormery (played by Nino Jouglet) learning the lessons of childhood as he grows up in poverty. Through this structure, Amelio elucidates the parallels between the two time periods; as in many of the other child-centered films I’ve discussed recently, the perceptions and responses we experience as children are not entirely removed from the adult world. The difference isn’t one of kind but of scope and effect. The violence meted out by inflexible authority can be seen in a grandmother’s corporal punishment and a government’s capital punishment; the reproduction of imperialist ideology traces a line from the recitation of schoolbooks to the banners of pied-noir extremists. It’s through these parallels that Amelio locates Cormery’s (and Camus’s) understanding of his writing, and of his intellectual authority, as a site of resistance. In the 1920s, young Cormery recites a poem; in the 1950s, in the face of crisis, an old teacher suggests he should write a book about Algeria. “Novels are where you find the truth,” Cormery is told.
The film also finds truth where it can; as the older Cormery makes his way through Algiers, the geography of the place has a haunted quality to it, where the lyrical, softer portraiture of the city in flashback are replaced by the harsh noontime glare of a city under siege. There’s an awareness of history here—perhaps too ironically aware at times; when Cormery asks his mother why she won’t leave Algeria, she replies, “France is beautiful, but the Arabs aren’t there.”
But the film’s most poignant moments come from its invocation of cinematic history and recalls another time an Italian director took French Algeria as his subject. Shots of Cormery making his way through the alleys and stairways of the Casbah revisit similar, but inverted moments from Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, and the film’s only major digression away from Cormery’s life is when it follows a tragic subplot involving one of his childhood classmates, Hamoud (Abdelkarim Benhabboucha), whose son has been imprisoned for involvement with the resistance. We see their struggle, but Cormery can only perceive it at a remove, secondhand and indirect. Gamblin’s performance captures the writer’s work to encapsulate that story, to take it and shape it and send it back out into the world.
As in The Battle of Algiers, there’s even a scene that takes place in a cafe: As Cormery sits at a table and writes, young French couples slow dance on the floor, and one of the girls catches Cormery’s eye. The parallels between her and other women her age fighting on the streets of Algiers are urgent yet unspoken. But the power of the scene comes from the look that Cormery and the girl share, a stretched-out moment between her impassive, elegiac gaze and his introspective one, a moment that lingers until it’s punctured and the film must move on. It’s never returned to, never commented on. It may not slot into the story that Cormery, the writer and intellectual, is trying to tell. And yet it haunts. In a film driven by a quest for understanding and the hope that the telling of a story might avert catastrophe, that it might redeem a people, that moment stands outside all that.
The Los Angeles Film Festival
runs from June 14—24.
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