Suspended Time

Given the muted critical response and prolonged time period between its festival premiere and eventual (limited) distribution, the new Olivier Assayas film has apparently been deemed “minor.” It’s true, Suspended Time is resolutely, even defiantly, small-scaled, a time capsule of a very recent past that people seem determined to memory-hole. Suspended Time is a Covid movie, taking place during the early days of the 2020 lockdown. And while it hits some now overly familiar tropes of this peculiar subgenre — masking, wiping down groceries, anxieties over spacing between bodies — it’s also a quiet, often moving memory piece. Assayas is no stranger to autobiographical work, whether mining his childhood in oblique ways for Cold Water and Summer Hours or more directly in Something in the Air, and Suspended Time takes this mode a step further, incorporating voiceover narration from the filmmaker himself, as well as essayistic interludes that inject a documentary mode into the autofiction. It’s all very low-key, even subdued, but gradually a portrait emerges of a middle-aged man forced to confront major life changes, particularly with regard to how death becomes a material concern rather than an abstract idea. 

As the film begins, filmmaker Paul (Assayas regular Vincent Macaigne) and his music journalist brother Etienne (Micha Lescot) are some weeks into cohabitating in their family’s country home in Chevreuse, a small hamlet south of Paris (the house is Assayas’ actual family home). They are joined by their respective girlfriends, Morgane (Nina D’Urso) and Carole (Nora Hamzawi). Morgane is some years younger than Paul, who shares custody of a young daughter with his ex-wife. Etienne and Carole, meanwhile, have been together for some time, although Etienne has only recently made the decision to leave his wife and formally declare his relationship with Carole. The quartet eat, drink, take Zoom calls, and otherwise fill their time with chatting and reading. It’s an extended reminiscence, a taking of stock not only for the characters, but for Assayas himself (who’s now pushing 70 years old). 

The director’s frequent collaborator Eric Gautier keeps the framings simple, bathing everything in natural light, while Assayas’ narration acts as a kind of segue between scenes, as he intones on his own family’s history, memories of his father’s library, and a litany of artists who made an impression on him in his youth. There are a few asides about more contemporary matters; Assayas is clearly quite enamored of David Hockney, highlighting some of the famed artist’s digital works produced during lockdown, and of course Monet makes an appearance. It’s all very breezy, like a screwball comedy slowed down to the pace of a casual conversation with an old friend. As critic Filipe Furtado notes, the film is almost entirely devoid of conflict; Paul and Etienne bicker as brothers do, but it never boils over, to the point even that a scorched cooking pot (the result of a miscommunication between the two men) becomes a kind of recurring gag, with Paul desperately scrubbing at it rather than simply buying a new one. Noisy neighbors are a nuisance that are quickly laughed off, and frequent calls to therapists feel like checking in with an old friend rather than an outpouring of anxieties or neuroses. 

Ultimately, there ends up being one moment that nicely encapsulates the film’s quiet power and movingly reflects its preoccupations. We hear an audio recording of the filmmaker Jean Renoir relating the moment his father, painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, passed away. The great artist was surrounded by family, and with his dying breath made some weak brushstrokes on a canvas. His last act was an artistic gesture, a lovely sentiment to consider as our world continues to spin off its axis. We can’t control everything, but we can at least try to leave something beautiful behind. — DANIEL GORMAN

Wild Diamond

It’s rather rare for debut features to world premiere in Competition at Cannes. The second-tier lineup, Un Certain Regard, is the festival’s typical launchpad for new directors, the Competition most often reserved for well-established auteurs. Agathe Riedinger’s Wild Diamond is one of the handful of first features to secure a Competition berth, and this can be a double-edged sword. From an art film perspective, the exposure couldn’t be higher. But by placing Wild Diamond among films by the likes of Yorgos Lanthimos, David Cronenberg, and Jia Zhangke, the festival programmers are setting sky-high expectations for the film, ones it almost certainly cannot live up to. And indeed, Wild Diamond is a promising but largely unsophisticated film, with Riedinger often making her very obvious themes even more explicit through dialogue.

“Beauty gives people hope,” says 19-year-old Liane (newcomer Malou Khebizi), and that hope comes in the form of Instagram- and TikTok-driven e-fame. Liane has fantasies of becoming an online influencer, and when we first meet her, she has a paltry 10,000 followers. (I know, right?) Her fortunes appear to change when she gets a call from a casting agent (Antonia Buresi) asking her to audition for the new season of a reality show called Miracle Island. In the audition scene, Liane is standing in front of a neutral background, wearing next to nothing, all the better to show off the boob job she paid for by waiting tables. Liane promises that she will “make a buzz,” and she does. Once she posts that she’s auditioned for Miracle Island, her social media presence explodes, and she starts to think she may have found a way out of her dead-end life.

The contrast between Liane’s online existence and her material one could hardly be starker. She lives with her unemployed mother (Andréa Bescond), who has a revolving door of “sugar daddies,” and her younger sister Alicia (Ashley Romano), whose garish, exaggerated make-up resembles Liane’s. Caring for her little sister seems to be Liane’s only consistent tether to the offline world. Even her friends look as if they’ve walked out of a low-rent nightclub, poor girls badly play-acting at sophistication. Then again, as Riedinger takes great pains to point out, the baseline for sophistication in contemporary media has devolved considerably. Liane says she hopes to be “the new Kim Kardashian,” and they share that family’s obsession with ostentatious wealth, cartoonish body modification, and a blasé conviction that superficiality is the coin of the realm, that a pornographic hyper-femininity is the key to self-empowerment.

If this all sounds like it’s coming from the perspective of an old man (which I guess I am) or a conservative scold (which I’m not), no matter. Riedinger has already established a place for the judgmental viewer. After an opening scene that finds Liane practicing stripper-pole moves on a lamp post in a parking lot, we see her being harassed on the Metro. A young man calls her a “slut” and a “whore,” and this is understandably painful for Liane. Thing is, she seems to confuse her online personality with who she actually is, and who she will naturally be in real life. If there’s anything in Wild Diamond that could charitably be called subtext, it’s that Gen Alphas take for granted that they are their own images, that the Internet is more real than anything out in the streets. This speaks to a collapse of traditional notions of psychological interiority, but as we see, Liane is a person with a subjectivity, stranded in a liminal space within a society in rapid transition.

One suspects these very au courant topics were what led the team at Cannes to place Wild Diamond in Competition, but it might also be a nagging sense of familiarity. In 1999, the Dardenne brothers won the Palme d’Or for their film Rosetta, and in many respects Wild Diamond is the same film, only updated for this skin-deep phase of hypercapital. Like Liane, Rosetta lived with an inattentive mother in lower-class conditions. Like Liane, Rosetta was always hustling to try to find ways to make it out of this dead-end life and make something of herself. But Rosetta saw her escape in the service economy, managing a waffle stand. Brick-and-mortar commerce, tangible product. Liane can only fathom becoming an online influencer or a reality TV star because all we produce are signs, aspirational images of a good life hardly any of us will ever achieve. And, like Rosetta, Liane finds a boy, Dino (Idir Azougli), who really cares about her, seeing her as a human being rather than a commodity. But love and money prove incompatible. Riedinger contrasts Dino’s words of support with the praise and vulgarity left by anonymous commenters on Liane’s Insta. In the end, Liane casts her lot with the dopamine hit of social media, and Wild Diamond suggests that even if it’s not the right choice, it’s the only one a young adult in 2024 could ever be expected to make. — MICHAEL SICINSKI

Planet B

In Aude Léa Rapin’s sci-fi drama, Planet B, the French government has imprisoned dissidents in a virtual prison. Bodies are kept in a vegetative state inside a top secret black site while their avatars (i.e., identical digital facsimiles of the characters) wander a picturesque, seaside villa. There they are subjected to psychological warfare and enhanced interrogations in an effort to break a populist uprising condemned as domestic terrorism. It’s a dystopian premise that incorporates recognizable elements of The Matrix and The Prisoner and features international stars like Adèle Exarchopoulos and Souheila Yacoub (Dune: Part Two) while nodding at hot button topics such as the global creep of authoritarianism, the exploitation of immigrants, torture, and Metaverse-like virtual realities. It also stands up to exactly zero scrutiny as either an allegory for much of anything or as simply a high-concept take on the jail break movie. In going full “ripped from the headlines,” Rapin loses the thread entirely. Planet B jogs in place while making broad gestures to societal ills that we’re meant to understand could someday lead to far-flung scenarios just like this. But the film never remotely makes the argument why anyone would bother with all this technocratic nonsense or why allowing the unconscious mind to lounge by a virtual pool all day amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. It’s still all the drudgery, manpower, and warehousing of prison, only the film gets to stage scenes of confinement at a swank Airbnb in the south of France.

Exarchopoulos plays Julia, a lieutenant in a nebulously-defined insurgency striking back against the state in a future 10 years from now. There are passing references to the scourge of fossil fuels, but it mostly feels like the sort of ideologically vague “fight the man” activism you often see in YA literature; it’s the sort of film where more thought has been put into the designer neck tattoos of the character than an actual governing philosophy. When the hideout where Julia is stationed is raided by the police, she inadvertently kills an officer in self-defense before taking a bullet to the face. Awaking after an indeterminate period of time with tellingly no injuries and a discreet “B” engraved just below her eye, Julia inexplicably finds herself in a sprawling oceanside estate along with half a dozen other techno-punk comrades in arms. Although there are abundant signs that the characters are trapped in a virtual space, including invisible force fields that rebuff their efforts to move beyond the perimeter of the house and a confessional room which is a literal black void that allows them to interact with the disembodied voices of their jailors (to say nothing of their grievous injuries having miraculously healed without leaving so much as a scar), Julia and her cohorts still make quixotic attempts to escape during the “day time” while at night they are tormented by spectral visions of their victims, reminding them of their crimes while serving as assaultive, waking nightmares.

On a parallel track, Iraqi refugee Nour (Yacoub) is a week away from being deported from France. A former journalist living under an assumed identity (visas and official papers are now QR codes scanned off of someone’s contact lenses), the only employment she can secure requires being rounded up in a blacked-out passenger van with other undocumented immigrants to do janitorial work at an off-the-books government facility. One night, for reasons that are largely unmotivated — there’s a lot of that going around in this film — she lifts a state-of-the-art VR headset and somehow smuggles it out of the building undetected along with the night’s trash. Stymied in her efforts to hawk it for quick cash, she eventually puts the headset on and finds herself able to freely enter and exit the same virtual prison that houses Julia (the only thing that visually differentiates Nour from the inmates is she lacks the little “B” on her face). Emerging like a ghost, Nour forms a quick kinship with Julia, who conceals Nour’s presence from the other prisoners while using her to pass messages to the outside world. With the government trying to track their expensive, possibly illegal, headset — while being unable to deduce that it was probably one of the financially desperate nighttime cleaning people who stole it — Nour has a precious few days to secure a travel visa that will allow her to escape to Canada, try and free Julia and the rest from Planet B, and publish an article that will bring to light the entire operation.

The overriding issue with Planet B is that it functions as a series of thought-starters that nobody bothered to think through. The film keeps introducing new wrinkles to the premise, but the fallacy behind them starts to become self-evident. For instance, what is the point of constructing a photorealistic virtual prison if it still requires confining someone in an actual prison? If you’re still housing someone, feeding someone (albeit intravenously), providing medical treatment, and employing armed guards to observe the entire operation, that’s just a hat on a hat. Further, the only strategic advantage to tricking someone into believing they’re not incarcerated is squandered if it’s obvious they’re residing within a virtual construct (although the characters are told their actions and words aren’t being observed while in Planet B, everyone still clams up, operating under the assumption they’re being lied to). The film never even comes down on a side as to whether “corporeal” punishment or even death in Planet B has any lasting consequence in the real world, so we’re forced to sit through scenes of the characters’ avatars slaughtering one another where it’s unclear whether we’re simply a reset button away from returning to the status quo. And since we’re asking questions here, if this black site is such a serious security concern, why are they employing unvetted day laborers to dust and empty the wastebaskets? 

All the “this could happen” alarmism is merely a fig leaf on what’s ultimately an entirely conventional, low-budget genre film. While the scenes inside Planet B benefit from the production values of being set against the tropical vegetation and cliffs of Saint-Raphaël — the one visual conceit that’s effective here is how, as the population of the prison balloons with new detainees arriving daily, what began as a single-level home keeps “magically” adding stories, the residence starting to resemble a giant Jenga-like tower — the majority of the film is spent observing Yacoub navigating under-dressed and under-lit industrial spaces. The actress spends much of her time hunched over her laptop in darkened stairwells and sub-basements or rushing past sparsely-populated refugee encampments. Everything from the production design to the visual effects to the film’s lighting and photography looks chintzy, like something produced for cable television. It gets to the point where visits to Planet B start to feel like a reprieve from the gloomy squalor of reality, although the film is entirely uninterested in interrogating this contradiction. The same could be said for the relationship that forms between Nour and Julia, which we’re meant to understand is transactional in nature until at some point it evolves into something else. It all leads to a decision late in the film by Nour that defies all logic and everything we know about the character other than serving as a reminder that Exarchopoulos is one of the most beautiful women on earth whose charms seemingly no one is immune to. Perhaps, then, the film is really just meant to be a metaphor for online dating; after all, who hasn’t thrown caution to the wind and made a sweeping, self-defeating gesture for someone they’ve never actually met in person? — ANDREW DIGNAN

Three Friends

“Boasting roughly a dozen features and a handful of short films, French cineaste Emmanuel Mouret has proven himself a peculiar taste and charm for specific circles of European arthouse enthusiasts. His rom-coms and dramas usually either follow a central figure in a series of different encounters, relationships, or situationships (Please, Please Me and Caprice) or in the fashion of a network narrative revolving around a group of characters/couples who, bored and dissatisfied with their imperfect lives, search for an ideal relationship (The Art of Love and Love Affair(s)). His most recent effort, Three Friends, belongs to the latter designation…” [Previously Published Full Review.] — AYEEN FOROOTAN

Meeting with Pol Pot

It’s been over a decade now since I caught Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture at the Vancouver Film Festival. The director’s chronicle of his memories of life in Cambodia in the time of the Khmer Rouge is one of the most emotionally overwhelming non-fiction films I’ve ever seen. I haven’t kept up with his work since then, all of which, as far as I know, mostly also concerns the history and memory of the Cambodian genocide, but he was a surprisingly odd and entertaining follow on Twitter, back when that was a thing. His latest film, Meeting with Pol Pot, is a fictionalized adaptation of the University of Washington graduate Elizabeth Becker’s When the War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge RevolutionI, a memoir of her journey, with two other journalists, to visit Cambodia in 1978 and, as the title says, meet with Pol Pot. In life, as in the film, it ends badly.

Irène Jacob plays Lise Delbo, the Becker stand-in. She’s joined by Grégoire Colin as Alain Cariou (Scottish academic Malcolm Caldwell), a Marxist activist who knew many of the Khmer Rouge leadership, including Pol Pot, in Paris before the war, and Cyril Gueï as Paul Thomas (journalist Richard Dudman), a photographer. Here, the three leads are escorted around various Potemkin villages (art studios, workshops, farms) and given standard answers about the greatness of Democratic Kampuchea, while growing ever more uneasy at the things they aren’t being told and the apparent cult of personality being built around Pol Pot (“Brother #1,” he’s oxymoronically called). Delbo hopes to find her old translator, who, as an intellectual from Phnom Penh, has either been relocated to a collective in the country or (more likely, we know and she suspects) been murdered. Cariou longs to see the success of his friends putting their idealistic theories into action, but becomes increasingly disillusioned by the obvious fraud and lurking violence surrounding them more or less explicitly. Thomas boldly escapes from their watchers and travels into the countryside, where he’s horrified by what he finds.

As the tour continues, Meeting with Pol Pot becomes increasingly surreal and disassociated. Rithy uses old stock footage — some of which looks very much like it might have come from something Becker would have shot — and carved miniatures in elaborate dioramas to depict things for which the extras and set-building required would likely have been cost-prohibitive. These devices also serve as correspondences for what the characters are thinking, as when Delbo imagines scenes of pre-war Cambodia while rummaging through a ruined house in the city, or when Thomas sees things so horrible he can’t process them as reality, only as images or constructions. The trajectory thus mirrors that of Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now: representatives of the “civilized” world descending into the horrors of “Third World” insanity, a pandemonium largely created by the actions and ideas of Western civilization. The connection of the elite of the Khmer Rouge (if that contradiction in terms doesn’t invalidate their whole project) to European Marxism helps to undermine the implicit imperialism of Conrad’s template, since what is happening in Cambodia (as in Vietnam, as in Belgian Congo) is as much a product of Western thought (imperialist and Marxist) as it is anything native to those regions.

Meeting with Pol Pot also recalls, of course, a pair of classic films about journalism in Southeast Asia: Ann Hui’s Boat People and Roland Joffé’s The Killing Fields. Both films, like Rithy’s, center outside journalists as observers of new ostensibly Communist states. Both films differ from Rithy’s in that they offer native protagonists to balance the outsider experience: Hui’s examines post-war Vietnam through the eyes of a Japanese photo-journalist, as well as a young Vietnamese man attempting to escape the country; Joffé splits his narrative between the Cambodian photojournalist Dith Pran and his friends in the American and European media. Rithy, on the other hand, only gives us the outsider perspective in his narrative, the only Cambodians seen being either sinister troops holding guns or mouthpieces for the state who smile way too much or peasants (or people reduced to peasantry) who are terrified of everyone. Except, of course, that Rithy himself is an insider, and his personal perspective colors every scene and every shot. It’s a Cambodian’s view of the French journalists who come to Cambodia unsure of, if not outright supportive of, the Khmer Rouge, and slowly see their beliefs crumble before the brutal consequences of those ideals. Because Rithy’s view of the Khmer Rouge is not that they’ve deviated from Marxist orthodoxy, but that they simply followed it to its logical conclusions. That their ideology was too pure. The more brutally apparent these facts become, the more lost in the unknown our heroes become. One disappears, another is murdered, and the third is, most inexplicably, sent home to safety. — SEAN GILMAN

Visiting Hours

Patricia Mazuy is one of the greatest directors working today, but you’d hardly know it from how often her films are screened or talked about. Each release, then, becomes an occasion for a stronger (and, hopefully, less insular or cultish) case for her films to break out of a parochial point of view, one centred, for the time being, within France or New York. Her latest, Visiting Hours, presents a bit of a problem in this sense. While it features Isabelle Huppert in a key role, just like in Saint-Cyr, the director and actor’s previous collaboration, Huppert provides color and ballast in her role as Alma — self-mockingly calling herself the “bourgeois pal” of the film’s central, unexpected couple — rather than assuming the role of a protagonist.

Mazuy’s usual way of developing character is through impulse, friction, and total commitment to an idea. Her characters never self-destruct completely, but they’re allergic to self-preservation, and vault past the bounds of acceptable behavior and genre constraints alike. Mina (Hafsia Herzi) is nothing like that. In the film’s inciting scene, we learn one important detail: she is bad at lying. So bad, in fact, that Alma finds the fact that she dares to nevertheless try — in order to keep her elapsed visiting slot at a Bordeaux prison — an eccentric, attractive flaw. Both Alma and Mina have husbands serving time, and because Alma has a house whose walls are covered with an art collection and tables adorned with flowers, but whose many rooms are empty, she invites Mina in. She does so without forethought, a luxury she enjoys and thrives on, as seen in the scenes where the two womens’ routines and working lives become intermixed: whatever Mina needs, Alma can suddenly, almost superfluously, pay for (like a PS5 for Mina’s two kids) or lie to obtain (like a school placement after a sudden change of district).

Mazuy, whose choice of setting is usually rural and isolated, but is here suburban, is clearly a filmmaker who enjoys the challenge of making an idiosyncratic film about people who, because of a pocket of available time, and the shared experience of misfortune, fall into fascination with one another. Unlike something like Mikhaël Hers’ The Passengers of the Night, where the film’s open door is a question of care and charity and agency, neither character in Visiting Hours can consider themselves free: their proximity to their husbands is a requirement, and one they don’t intend to rend entirely. Their anger remains locked inside. As a distraction or a cure, they genuinely try to know each other: Alma leads with a disarming backstory, and Mina allows Alma to feel useful, listened to, and less of a ghost in her own house.

But this is, of course, not a simple, inspiring story of sisterhood. Mazuy is far too interested in what remains hidden, in ruination, and in the way all interactions contain the capacity for limit-testing, good and ill. What makes Visiting Hours appear to be a minor work, or a deviation, is that the class division of the characters, and the social-legal organization of their lives, means that their ability to act is carefully measured — while not in the original French title, the ironic “Hours” and their measuring toll are important to how Mazuy considers narrative possibility in the film. That is, that if lying is key to how these characters meet, it is also the basis on which they interact with the world: the lie of optimism, and the easily frayed truth of putting up with a situation so long as it serves certain needs.

More than one critic has wondered if Visiting Hours’ climax falls into too many expectations about the differences between hosts and guests, class differences and backgrounds, but Mazuy, at the very least, can be trusted to convey far more than these surface details. Her characters never care much for the future, because they’re too busy making use of their present conditions for expression, even over survival. When Mina commits a relatively small and ineffective, yet still devastating, act late in the film, it’s an obvious risk, and a coded manner of betrayal. But more than that it’s a transcendent manoeuvre, both brave and empty — an act of cowardice that veils something as counterintuitively generative as any of the climaxes in Mazuy’s other films. The difference is that this time, boundaries remain unbroken, and closure settles in. For Mazuy, it’s a strange change of pace, but Visiting Hours remains a film with an uncommon lively streak, even if its range of expression is ultimately limited relative to the director’s best work. — MICHAEL SCOULAR

Jim’s Story

“The fraternal duo of Arnaud and Jean-Marie Larrieu have been making films together for around 25 years. An early featurette of theirs, Roland’s Pass (2000), screened in the New York Film Festival’s Main Slate, and they’ve even had one film, 2005’s To Paint or Make Love, selected for competition at Cannes. Nevertheless, the Larrieus have not achieved the exalted heights of other auteurs of their generation, and this is despite ongoing working relationships with some of France’s most accomplished actors, including Mathieu Amalric, Karin Viard, and Sergi López…” [Previously Published Full Review.] — MICHAEL SICINSKI

Foreign Tongue

The title of Claire Burger’s film Foreign Tongue holds both literal and symbolic meaning: its leading characters, French and German teenagers Fanny (Lilith Grasmug) and Lena (Josefa Heinsius), acclimate themselves to speaking in each other’s native languages over the course of the film, yet as their relationship deepens, they also struggle to understand the distinct personal and cultural contexts that shape how they communicate. By threading political history and contemporary protest movements into an otherwise intimate adolescent love story, Burger deploys her young protagonists as stand-ins for the pains and rewards of connecting across difference — and, impressively, crafts this allegory without sacrificing complexity in narrative and characterization.

The film, written by Burger and Léa Mysius, is split into two parts of about equal length. In the first, Fanny goes to her pen pal Lena’s house in Leipzig for a month-long visit, despite Lena’s initial displeasure at having her as a guest and the fact that Fanny knows little German. Fanny, quiet and emotionally recessive, reveals to Lena after a few days that her mother, who is an old friend of Lena’s mother, sent her to stay there for a month after inescapable bullying at school and a recent suicide attempt. Lena warms to her after this honest disclosure, and the two gradually become inseparable. Lena expresses her belief in radical, leftist political action with Fanny, and her fears for the future of the world, and Fanny confides her more personal anxieties and insecurities with Lena. Fractures begin to show in Lena’s home life over this time, particularly in her complicated relationship with her emotionally immature, possibly alcoholic, mother Suzanne (a compelling Nina Hoss), while Burger drops hints that Fanny is not always honest with Lena. Yet by the visit’s end, Fanny and Lena’s relationship has blossomed into a romantic intimacy, and both girls have gained evident self-assurance.

In the film’s second half, Lena visits Fanny’s home in Strasbourg for two weeks, and the visit quickly becomes emotionally fraught. They are closer than ever, but Lena witnesses Fanny’s classmates’ cruelty toward her firsthand, and Fanny is short-tempered with her parents (Chiara Mastroianni and Jalal Altawil). They become obsessed with tracking down Fanny’s estranged sister, an antifascist activist who Fanny claims she met once and is the product of an affair her father had. Yet questions begin to mount about how truthful Fanny has been with Lena about this supposed family secret.

Burger follows the course of Fanny and Lena’s relationship with patience and detail, capturing each small change in their dynamic. Grasmug and Heinsius navigate the changing tides of the relationship capably, acting their roles with the appropriately guarded, laconic attitude of wary teenagers, then revealing deeper and more complex shades of characterization as they open up to one another. Grasmug plays Fanny as essentially good-natured and people-pleasing, but with a constantly nervous energy that tips into desperation when she feels threatened, and Heinsius reveals layers of sensitivity and fear beneath an external attitude of moral certitude. 

Burger and Mysius’ screenplay also weaves political conflict and turmoil into the personal lives of Fanny and Lena. Both experience a barrage of cultural stereotypes from their peers when taking classes at each other’s schools through an exchange program, despite France and Germany’s close ties. And as the child of an Arab father (his specific nationality goes unmentioned), Fanny has had lifelong first-hand experience with racism and xenophobia, and she is placed in an uncomfortable position when Lena’s right-wing, anti-immigrant grandfather peppers her with questions about her parents’ work as Arabic translators at a family gathering.

Of all the film’s political considerations, Lena’s commitment to protest has perhaps the most direct effect on Fanny and Lena’s relationship. While Fanny is less politically activated than Lena at the film’s outset, she affects an interest in radicalism in an effort to impress Lena and to perturb her parents. By the film’s close, she seems to have become genuinely more immersed in leftist political action as a result. Initially a point of separation between them that they struggle to bridge — Lena directs most conversations back to the resurgence of far-right politics and the necessity of counteraction, while Fanny is more concerned with her personal sphere — protest and leftist politics become a site of unity for the couple, with one of the film’s final scenes showing them having a blissful night out at a bar catering to young radicals.

Despite a few hiccups along the way — Lena has several dream sequences that feel extraneous, and while Burger typically manages shifts in tone and pacing effectively, a series of emotional reversals in the film’s third act are deployed in too quick of a succession to land entirely effectively — the director deftly guides this politically-inflected love story toward a bittersweet conclusion, keeping the adolescent drama and social context in balance throughout its duration. Foreign Tongue ultimately proves to be an emotionally involving, thoughtfully acted narrative of how the personal and the political inevitably, persistently affect one another.  — ROBERT STINNER

Ghost Trail

War stains the soul. It can haunt its victims like a specter, and the appropriately titled Ghost Trail centers on a scarred man who hovers through the world as if he were a ghost himself. Adam Bessa portrays Hamid, a Syrian literature professor from Aleppo who experiences personal catastrophe during the height of Syrian civil war. During his torturous detainment at Sednaya Prison — infamously known as the “Human Slaughterhouse” — he loses his wife and child to a bomb blast. Upon being freed, Hamid resettles in Germany, secretly collaborating with a vigilante cell pursuing the Syrian regime’s fugitive leaders. When his latest mission puts him on the trail of a man he believes to be his former torturer, his obsessive desire for justice complicates the new life he is building for himself.

As director Jonathan Millet’s first fiction feature, Ghost Trail benefits from his documentary background. Millet had originally planned to approach the film as a documentary, spending weeks speaking with Syrians at a treatment center for war and torture victims. Listening to their stories, he learned more about the underground networks of evidence hunters who sought after escaped war criminals. While prioritizing its character beats over its procedural ones, Ghost Trail builds its narrative architecture on a foundation of facts — Germany and France being the locations for the action, the methods of espionage Hamid employs, the ethical dilemmas dividing the group — that lend the drama its authentic texture. The consistently static camera and deliberately paced scenes slow down the viewer’s experience of time, reflecting how interminable the months of quiet observation feel for Hamid as his psyche strains. The use of natural sound pushes the film into the realm of hyperrealism, at key moments infusing the environments with a true-to-life tactility. In Ghost Trail, there’s an importance placed on what is tangible and what can be perceived. Hamid gathers intelligence on the streets, takes photographs, examines documents and recordings, all so he can be certain this is indeed his man. Evidential value is located in a thing’s material essence, this solidity counterbalancing the nature of the regime’s violent terror — kidnappings and disappearances, extrajudicial ambiguity, the horror of depersonalization and of absence.

If one side of this slow-burning spy thriller’s coin is its fixation on the physical, then its exploration of the psychological is the other. The main engine of Ghost Trail is Bessa’s captivating performance as Hamid. Bessa radiates this placid intensity, a constant look of stoic determination stretched paper thin to conceal an ocean of anguish beneath. The film presses the viewer to observe its protagonist just as he observes his target, searching for signs of truth beneath his mask. Hamid is a man who is alert but never present, his mind still imprisoned by the memories of what he’s suffered. Ghost Trail externalizes his internal hell, then, through its soundtrack, a nightmarish sonic landscape of distorted whispers and amplified feedback swelling within a pressurized vessel. Bessa, for his part, also worked with the crew to nail down the character’s physicality; Hamid’s pain and conflict are communicated through the rigidity of his gait and the tension in his body language. But b contrast, Ghost Trail’s supporting characters feel much more one-dimensional. Save for the suspect in Hamid’s sights, the enigmatic Rammah (grippingly played by Tawfeek Barhom), the other characters in Hamid’s orbit operate either as plot devices or foils, limiting the story’s scope to a character study of sorts. Yet Bessa is so magnetic as Hamid, who demonstrates greater layers over the course of the runtime, that he still manages to carry the film effectively enough.

Ghost Trail’s examination of trauma is its strongest thematic asset, though it’s also concerned with questions of justice. Those who have been victimized, marginalized, and displaced, whose paths toward healing and starting anew face a plethora of institutional obstacles daily, how can they most adequately seek justice? At what point does justice masquerade as revenge? Does the heinousness of the perpetrators justify any means of retribution? Here Ghost Trail is less incisive, with these points more broadly gestured at in discrete moments of dialogue. Millet, who co-wrote the screenplay, has said he wants the film to seek out any “possible hope” at all odds, and so the film insists on circumventing the tragic outcomes that its tragic structure suggests it will unpack. As the rays of optimistic light grow brighter in Ghost Trail’s latter half, the film too has a muddier handle on its resolution of certain conflicts. The result is that Millet’s film pursues truthful hyperrealism and sets up a premise with a compelling range of threads, before somewhat buckling under its own weight and settling for a firmly, frustratingly anodyne final catharsis. — TRAVIS DESHONG

In His Own Image

In a concise opening, Thierry de Peretti’s In His Own Image introduces its heroine Antonia (Clara-Maria Laredo), a young and passionate photographer who seems to be, despite her commitment to her work (here shown taking pictures of newlyweds), somewhat troubled and melancholic. Specifically, there’s the sense of inner demons at play, as she is first engaged in a mild phone argument with her mother, before being shown trying to drown some hidden sorrows in alcohol. Later, she unexpectedly and tragically dies in a car accident, which sets the narrative’s trajectory as a continuous chain of flashbacks accompanied by voiceover narration from Antonia’s longtime friend Simon (Marc-Antonu Mozziconacci) for the rest of the film. Adapted from Jérôme Ferrari’s novel of the same name, and set on the beautiful Mediterranean island of Corsica where the film spans from the late 1970s to the dawn of the 21st century, In His Own Image episodically chronicles the life and career of Antonia, from her earliest childhood obsession with the notion of photography — encouraged by her godfather (portrayed by Peretti), who presents her with an analog camera as a birthday gift — and her adolescent amateur endeavors, to developing a romance with the young FLNC (the National Liberation Front Of Corsica) radical militant Pascal (Louis Starace), her struggles as a talented photojournalist for the local newspaper Corse-Matin in Ajaccio that can never quite fulfill her ambitions amidst the political turmoil and protests in this coastal area, and her later efforts as a war photographer in former Yugoslavia. It’s an archeological journey to the past wherein both the personal and political, the tranquility of the sun-drenched Corsica and its political violent unrest, and more globally widespread tragedies are simultaneously intertwined within the same human ecosystem.

Throughout the film, Antonia’s half-uncertain and half-determined presence manifests as a reliable anchor during the constantly erratic upheavals of her world, and we frequently see her with her camera (both as a shield and a magnifying instrument for her gaze) trying to find the right distance and the perfect angles to capture her surroundings, subjects, the people. This is accompanied by her contemplation on what’s inside or should be inside an image (the seen) and what yet remains outside of the frame (the unseen), as if — never satisfied with what’s being shown in the media or can be observed through one’s eyes without the aid of camera lenses — she desperately seeks an uncapturable, final truth within everyday events and reality — along with trying to find meaning in life or even a solid identity in the dominant, brutal male world. And in a sense, this concept works nicely in tandem with Peretti’s unbiased and objective aesthetic approach. While In His Own Image’s overall unadorned visual realism remains dominant throughout — an approach which, on some level, tiptoes the border between fiction and cinéma vérité while folding in still images and archival material — Peretti’s precise mise en scène, particularly with regarding to composing and blocking crowded scenes, showcases a painterly effect that even comes to resemble the stylistic artistry of some Renaissance paintings.

And, again, part of In His Own Image’s captivating allure is that without ever isolating the political backdrop or over-emphasizing the events at hand, Peretti manages to exhibit these radical Nationalist actions and conflicts (sabotage, kidnapping, execution, etc.) within the natural flow of everyday activities and liveliness of the citizenry. Whether gathering in local cafes, bars, or a concert venue where dancing, imbibing, and friendly chats abound, In His Own Image offers an intersection where joie de vivre meets with inescapable terror, violence, and maladies of the larger world. Though it’s true that the film’s elliptical and fragmented approach may occasionally feel scattershot or schematic, and lacking density with regard to character developments — and that’s on top of the fact that the subject matter and historical context may not be entirely accessible or relatable to most non-domestic viewers — In His Own Image nevertheless paints a panoramic fresco of multiple eras and generations that allows the audience to freely navigate various events and situations. The result is a personal exploration which manages to bring the viewer’s own objective and subjective experiences in conversation with Antonia’s, all of us at the mercy of such existential bewilderments as love and loss, trauma and ecstasy. — AYEEN FOROOTAN