FIDMarseille 2019 | #2
I’d never really thought about Marseille as somewhere I could go to until I went there, and I’m not really sure why it has always felt so unattainable to me. It’s a stop on the Eurostar, albeit an inconvenient one, and the south of France isn’t really that far away from the south of England. It’s a 95 minute flight from London Stansted to Marseille Provence, one of those flights that’s just long enough to feel like you’re in the air but not long enough for the claustrophobia to set in. A flight where, in England, it’s pushing nineteen degrees celsius on an overcast summer’s evening as I walk across the tarmac to the plane, but as I do the same in reverse when I land in France, on a balmy Mediterranean evening, it’s perhaps ten degrees warmer and, with the hour time difference, almost three hours later in the day. I was expecting it to be hot here in July, but I wasn’t expecting the extent to which the heat impacts the city’s culture. Before lunch, Marseille feels eerily quiet, like a small town just waking up, but after midnight, you can barely move for people. Restaurants serve food into the early hours, and bars seem to stay open until sunrise. As for the festival, midnight screenings feel like less of an event here than they do in the UK, and 10am screenings seem to be exclusively for those of us willing to trade sleep for cinema.
I guess that explains the low turnout for my first screening of the festival, Tsai Ming-liang’s Sand, the eighth film in his Walker series and a film that, on paper, is certainly a daunting prospect first thing in the Mediterranean morning. Tsai’s regular collaborator Lee Kang-sheng portrays a monk in red robes, walking excruciatingly slowly across a succession of desolate beaches and adjacent woodland in the north-east of Taiwan. Almost entirely made up of long, static wide shots, each held in a fixed gaze for several minutes, Tsai’s Walker films are designed to emphasise the space the monk is traversing rather than the action of his movement, which is so protracted that the viewer’s eyes can easily wander around the frame without losing track of the monk’s progress. In Tsai’s earlier Journey To The West, the monk walks around the busy streets of Marseille, often shadowed by Denis Lavant, as passersby live their lives around his presence, always making the effort to give him a respectfully wide berth. In Sand, there are no passersby, and equally no respect. The monk’s walk begins on a beach strewn with dozens of wind-battered plastic tents, tangled nets and several fishing rods half-submerged in the sand, long-since abandoned by a way of life that doesn’t seem to function here anymore. The death of an industry, and a graveyard to human wastefulness. Tsai’s style allows time for these images to be studied and felt, and the duration of each shot puts a focus on the absence of people. What happened to this place? Where did the fishermen go? Where do we go from here? The monk finds his way to a construction site just off the beach, and gradually navigates the newly-laid foundations of a large house built so close to the ocean that the crashing of waves can be heard through the walls. The dawn of a new industry, perhaps, but surely a doomed one. A house built on sand, and nobody to live in it.
In preparation for my time in Marseille, I watched the episode of Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown devoted to the city. In it, Bourdain accompanies a local fisherman as he checks nets laid out in the sea the night before. This day’s work is fruitless, and the fisherman goes home empty-handed, but ready to try again tomorrow. This brief aside stood out as one that echoed my time at FIDMarseille. There’s so much to discover here, but that doesn’t mean you’ll find it. The Bertrand Bonello retrospective, for example, one of the biggest draws of this year’s festival, at least for me, was entirely unsubtitled, and my viewing of Zombi Child fell largely on deaf ears. On the other end of the scale, a friend told me that Juan Rodrigáñez's Derechos Del Hombre was one of the highlights of the festival after I’d missed every one of its three screenings. Never mind. I’ll catch up with what I missed later. It’s the joy of discovery that makes a festival like FIDMarseille so exciting. It's better to think about what you did see than dwell on what you didn't.
In Tadasuke Kotani’s Tamaran Hill, teenager Hinako is asked about her family history as part of a job interview preparation class. Her mother died when she was young and her father travels a lot for work, and her caginess at answering the question provokes her teacher into suggesting that she constructs a fake story to deliver confidently as the truth. Disaster survivors are apparently in vogue, and so the story put to Hinako is that she survived the deadly earthquake that killed her mother. This false story instigates a journey to discover her past, and leads her to the mysterious word “tamaran,” a word with several meanings, syllabic derivations and contexts that seems to follow her around: her father uses it as a swear word, it’s the name of a steep hill in a nearby town, and it appears in the title of a “book about hometowns” she’s recommended at the local bookstore. As she reads this book, brief excerpts are re-enacted on screen, while her hazy memories of her mother are sketchily animated on screen, interrupting the flow of her journey into her family’s unspoken past. As all of these threads slowly begin to overlap with one another, Hinako’s search for truth becomes entangled with fiction, and it becomes harder and harder to pin down exactly whether these moments are from Hinako’s reality, from the novel she’s reading, or whether it’s all just part of a larger fiction. And if it is a fiction, is it one designed to appease a pushy teacher, or one comprised of trial-and-error guesswork designed to fill gaps in her pursuit of her family’s history? Tamaran Hill is as unclassifiable as the word of its title, a film about the importance and fragility of one’s own personal history, and how easily memory can conflate the truth into an interpretation. It’s a fitting film to experience in Marseille, its tranquility and solitude totally at odds with the chaos in the streets outside, yet puzzling and mysterious in a way completely of a piece with this strange, frantic town on the Mediterranean Sea.