In these dispatches I often talk about themes naturally arising or not arising at all between films. Well, the throughline between these trio of titles couldn’t be clearer: They all thoroughly contemplate death and mortality. Two of the films are from veterans while a third one is a filmmaker’s feature directorial debut—though to be sure the latter has plenty of experience as a decorated shorts filmmaker too. Nevertheless, they all, to some extent, rebel against easy definitions, attempting to approach their weighty subject with the necessary rigor and complexity.
Leisurely yet profound, with “Nowhere to Lay My Eyes,” which had its world premiere in the festival’s Concorso Internazionale section, the multi-hyphenate auteur Hong Sang-soo offers one of his most existential works yet. The compact film, which netted Hong Best Director at Locarno, follows Sang-hee (Kim Min-hee, who won Best Actress at the fest), an experimental filmmaker venturing to Jeju Island with her younger brother to visit their mother (Choi Myung-gil) after a decade of geographic estrangement. While there she meets her mother’s new husband (Kwon Hae-hyo), who also happens to be a filmmaker. Contained within the familiar set-up are scenes well-known to any Hong fan: dinner table conversations, introspective thoughts about art, and ruminative walks—which are granted newer, arresting dimensions here.
Hong spends much of this melancholic film contemplating how art reflects death and mortality. For one, there’s Sanghee’s short films, one about a flower that we see at the picture’s conclusion, which appear to take comfort in life’s impermanence. The other cinematic end of this exploration resides in Sanghee’s stepfather, who explains that he’s spent two years filming a burial ritual called a “grass tomb,” whereby families place their loved one’s body above ground for it to decompose enough to polish the bones and then have the funeral. The description of the ceremony causes one to consider our imperfect relationship with death, and how senses of loss and acceptance that are equally hard to grasp.
Hong packs even more onto these themes: he contrasts the benefits of love and solitude, the ethics of documentary filmmaking with fictional dramas, and the war between Palestine and Gaza (though one wonders how much of this scene is meant to be didactic or probing). Throughout it all, he once again conjures patient performances from his actors; Kim and Kwon are especially fantastic at instilling rich inner lives to match these philosophical figures. Here Hong’s exacting compositions also feel less spontaneous and more planned, as though he knows he needs visual precision for such weighty talks to land. And while “Nowhere to Lay My Eyes,” in its quiet command of our mortal fears might suggest a slowing down of sorts, in reality, Hong Sang-soo is charging ahead with great intensity.
Beatrice Gibson’s assured feature debut “At Night” is a pensive picture fascinatingly set on a hypnotic Parisian night whose dreaminess belies the urgency of the film’s curiosity. For one, “At Night” understands the urban beauty of low-lit streets and rumbling transportation in a way that recalls Chantal Akerman’s “News from Home,” a film by a transplanted artist similarly consumed by the rootlessness of their life. Unlike that film, the correspondence isn’t between the filmmaker and her mother, but between six women, who share long debates at bars, in grocery stores, at bus stops, and on trains.
It’s on the latter where the film, which premiered in the festival’s Cineastí del Presente sidebar, begins. A static shot sitting high above train tracks watches as the locomotive barrels ahead. On the train is a British filmmaker director named B (played by Gibson), who is sending a voicemail to her partner back home. She explains that’s she arrived in Paris to location scout and misses her greatly. B’s story is later paralleled and then contrasted with Didi (Diocouda Diaoune), a single mother and Black immigrant unafraid of getting into rich political discussions. We oscillate between these two arcs whose orbits sometimes spin toward a few other women, which culminates in an incredible café discussion about sex, lesbianism, intersectional feminism, and aging. The ten-minute scene is nearly unbroken, relying on cutting whip pans to leap between perspectives. That immersive camera movement, coupled with dizzying, tactile 16mm photography of the florescent glow emanating from windows and the warmth of halogen streetlights reminds one that Ben Rivers shot this picture.
If the visual poetry weren’t enough, Gibson also includes specks of literal poetry as well, opening the film with a quote from the recently deceased poet Alice Notley and including a recording of her poem The Descent of Alette. Gibson, who previously premiered her short films “I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead” and “Two Sisters Who Are Not Sisters” at Rotterdam, experimental works whose abstractions buck against conventional plotting, re-states her interest in mood and ideas over story. That isn’t to say “At Night” is meandering. It’s quite laser focused. In fact, “At Night” is so fiercely independent in its construction and voice, it’s easy to slip into its open thoughts and soulful rhythms in a bid to grasp something on the edge of undefinable.
A Locarno and Berlinale veteran, Canadian independent filmmaker “Denis Côté (“Curling” and “A Skin so Soft”) returns to the former’s Concorso Internazionale with his latest work, “Nobody’s Violence,” a high-concept, slow-burn existential thriller about an atypical, hired gun. For one, Mira (Larissa Corriveau), the roving, stoic woman who moves from town to town with her tiny pup Mario, doesn’t carry a firearm or really any weapon. She also isn’t out to kill bad guys. Instead, she works for a company that sends loners like her to help with assisted suicides for those with terminal conditions. Harrowing and elusive, her narratively intriguing sojourns disappointingly soon give way to more conventional genre angst.
Before that misstep, what’s here is actually quite exciting. Côté spends much of the film’s first half avoiding giving answers. We instead follow Mira on her many jobs which moves between apprehensive clients who areeager to compassionately end it all. There’s one elderly woman who wants her hand held as she passes away and another young woman Mira meets in a car in a parking lot with six months to live. In between these jobs she finds some emotional release by playing with her dog and spending a day with the free-spirited Pierric Flanagan (Xavier Bergeron). Of course, not every experience goes smoothly: In one traumatic situation the grieving brother of the man who hired her verbally attacks her, causing her to question her profession. While one would think that soul-shaking moment would invite “Nobody’s Violence” to remain an elusive character study, Côté unfortunately moves the opposite direction.
He disavows the mysteriousness of his picture, which relied on brooding close-ups of an evocative Corriveau and dreamlike excursions shot handsomely on 16mm by Vincen Biron, for something more defined. The more answers he provides, the more magic his picture loses. “Nobody’s Violence” veers toward conventionality when Mira returns to her home base under the dogmatic eye of an unforgiving boss (Philippe Rebbot) intent on giving her further assignments rather than allowing her to mentally recalibrate. While this turn does set up a heartbreaking dilemma for her final mission, it feels like a bait-and-switch from the more morally complex questions the film gestures at in its first half—causing “Nobody’s Violence” to lose itself during its crawl back toward the familiar middle.
