Film Fest Gent 2024 | #1
There are an astonishing number of bikes in Ghent. Dozens and dozens and dozens of them at a time, all chained up in racks or on fences outside cafés and bars and train stations and cinemas, anywhere they fit, or clunking and whirring over cobbled streets day and night alongside a few trams and fewer buses and even fewer cars. The city is calmer because of it, even its bustling historical centre, where scores of tourists crowd and linger in front of cathedrals while locals zip silently between them on their bicycles. There's not much of a roar, of a drone. It’s all very peaceful, very simple, very slow. A nice place to walk around in, to have a beer in, to get lost in. And, as it turns out, to watch films in, which is how I ended up in Belgium in the first place. To watch films in a new city and to get lost in new streets. In the four days I was in town for Film Fest Gent, I ended up getting lost plenty of times, and managed to see eleven films. Some good, some less so. But all worthwhile in one way or another. The ones that hit the hardest were all about the same sense of aimless wandering that I was hoping to find for myself.
It would make sense to start with Tsai Ming-liang’s Abiding Nowhere, a film specifically about walking for the sake of walking. The tenth and supposedly final film in his Walker series, which began in 2012, Abiding Nowhere tracks in extended long takes the protracted movements of a monk, barefoot and dressed in vivid red robes, as he glacially walks through a series of spaces in and around Washington, D.C., starting in a forest before moving onto the city and its landmarks. Tsai cuts between the walker and another solitary man as he separately passes through many of the same spaces, but not at the same time, and the two men never cross paths. After more than a decade, the fundamentals of the Walker films are well established, and besides some subtle variations, like an occasional companion or a cut or a pan within the frame, very little has changed. Little except, of course, the locations. Washington D.C. isn’t as busy or as vibrant as Tsai’s previous cityscapes of Hong Kong or Marseille or Tokyo, with the monk more often than not framed against tastefully graffitied walls and sterile marble buildings. But Tsai fills these bland spaces with the cacophonous roar of planes and cars, all constantly screaming past off-screen. Modes of transport in stark contrast to the walker’s slow journey on foot, and an incessant reminder of the speed of modern life. As the monk moves, the world moves past him, again and again, leaving him behind. He’s still walking while the other man, having covered much of the same ground already, eats noodles on his own in his sparse, silent hotel room. The planes keep flying and the cars keep driving. Tsai isn’t particularly interested in assigning meanings to these images, and Abiding Nowhere is, as with the rest of the Walker series, a film about the simple act of observation. A film of watching how the world reacts to the walker, and of how he keeps walking in spite of all the noise, all the chaos, all the reasons to move faster. In an accelerated world, slowness will always be an act of defiance.
In Steven Soderbergh’s Presence, observation is the only thing possible. Filmed entirely from the perspective of a ghost haunting a suburban American home, the film plays out as a series of vignettes in which this ghost drifts aimlessly around the confines of the building and watches life unfold for the family who’ve just moved into it. As they settle into their new house, the tensions and traumas that brought them there are gradually revealed, or eavesdropped upon by the ghost, and it’s not long before they begin to sense an intangible presence: first as a feeling, of being watched, of not being alone, and later as witnesses to the inexplicable. Soderbergh’s camera functions as the ghost’s eyes, and these sensory encounters are presented as a direct response to the ghost’s proximity to members of the family. At one point, for example, a teenage girl suddenly stops in her tracks and spins around in startled surprise, expecting to see something, but of course there's nothing there. However, the close up of her face at this moment suggests that not only is the ghost in the room with her, just as she thought, right in front of her, looking straight at her, but that she was briefly able to perceive its presence, too. It’s a startling inversion of a classic jump-scare, in which the fear of being discovered is replaced by the fear of being watched by something impossible to comprehend. As the fragmentary narrative begins to fall into place, Soderbergh starts to explore the limitations of such an invisible perspective. Eventually, the ghost is rendered a passive observer to a terrible situation in which it cannot intervene but equally cannot turn away from, and so the scene plays out in a frustrating, excruciating long-take as things get worse and worse, while the ghost frantically tries to intervene. These moments reminded me of Brian De Palma’s Blow Out, which, perhaps coincidentally, I saw for maybe the dozenth time as part of the festival’s retrospective strand the following day, a film in which a sound technician hears a murder in real time but cannot do anything to prevent it. In Presence, the dangers are seen as well as heard, and viewed in extreme close up. And yet being an observer is still not enough. A brutal study of powerlessness.
There’s a similar sense of dread and desolation lingering over Kohei Igarashi’s Super Happy Forever. A man wanders aimlessly around a luxurious but near-empty tropical beach resort in the days before its closure, dragging his feet, looking miserable. He throws his phone in the sea mid-call. He asks a bewildered hotel receptionist whether they’ve found a red baseball cap he lost five years ago. And he abruptly leaves a conversation to perform a karaoke version of Bobby Darin’s Beyond The Sea. His behaviour is erratic to say the least, and it’s only a matter-of-fact comment in passing that reveals the reason for his unhappiness: his wife died a few days ago. Igarashi builds the film backwards from there, starting with this man’s grief and jumping back to five years earlier, to show how he and his wife met for the first time at this hotel and fell in love. Details from the present (the baseball cap, the room number, Beyond The Sea) are given their significance by the past. But they aren’t shown as memories. Igarashi adds a dimension of objectivity by jumping back in time to show the beginnings of this romance in flashback from her perspective, not his, and it has the effect of corroborating everything we’ve learned from him about their relationship. In the present, he explains how he first saw her in the hotel lobby, and in the past, we see this situation play out through her eyes in exactly the way he described it. There are no inflections, inconsistencies. No embellishments. And so the image becomes more concrete, more believable. And more powerful because of it. A film in which the present is enriched by the past, again and again, and so this love builds and builds through every new detail, towards an inevitable tragedy. A sad, straightforward love story told from end to beginning and one that, in its final gestures, begins to move forwards, onwards into an uncertain but hopeful future somewhere beyond the sea.