Because all this writer knew about Wind, Talk to Me entering its screening had come from a couple of synoptical lines that mentioned a “family” in a “lake house,” expectations were for, perhaps naively, a family drama similar to Angela Schanelec’s Afternoon — in which a lake house plays host to a family’s dissolution. Conflict was expected, as well as intellectual conversation, brooding by the lake, a feeling of isolation; instead, from the very first shot — a five-minute take — this writer was led to think of a very different movie: with this sort of natural stage at the fore, a clearing framed by dense green vegetation, brought immediately to mind was Straub-Huillet’s These Encounters of Theirs. There was only one difference: this stage was empty.
Offscreen we hear a cop talking to someone we can’t see. He enters the frame from the right and stands at the edge of the shot, but on such an extreme foreground that all we can see of him is part of his out-of-focus body. “License and registration. Why did you stop in the middle of the road anyway? Couldn’t you have waited another 200 meters?” A young man appears in the background, from behind a row of trees; he climbs a small rise, comes in our direction, but goes too far and ends up out of focus next to the cop. He hands him his papers and is allowed to continue his travel. That’s when this unbroken shot reveals us its secret: when the young man starts his offscreen car, the camera suddenly starts to move too, and we realize this scene had been filmed from the car’s window.
Later we will make another discovery. By now we’ve learned that he is visiting his family in the countryside for his grandmother’s 80th birthday, and that he intends to stay for a while in order to finish a movie he had been making with his now-deceased mother. We find him perched up on a tree, immobile and silent, in a shot again reminiscent of These Encounters of Theirs; a young boy, a sibling of his, goes up to him and asks, to no avail, what he is doing up there. Then the boy marches straight up to the camera and remarks: “he is filming!” A cut to the same camera position: and we now find next to him two kids and an older man, all posing on that same tree. The boy, immobile, complains that he is bored; the director answers that the quicker he stops talking, the quicker they will get their shot.
We are now able to understand why he had stopped his car “in the middle of the road” in that first scene: he was filming, and the cop broke into his shot just like his sibling did now. But if the cop gets no explanation and is forced to stay out of focus in the foreground, his family is asked to take part in the shooting.
This brief description contains most of the film’s plot: Wind, Talk to Me is a movie about the making of a movie, and the movie they are making, diegetically, is (just like the book written in La Recherche is La Recherche) the movie we are watching. This impression of watching something while it is being made gives these otherwise rigorous framings and slow, firm camera movements a sense of spontaneity and lightness, as if they were always open to chance. In this sense, that first scene is representative of the rest of the film. But most importantly, we feel that this Straubianism that elsewhere — even, for example, in a good film such as Marta Mateus’ recent Fire of Wind — leads to a certain rigidity, as if an incomplete absorption of Straub-Huillet’s cinema put too much focus on the grandiose and precise movements to the detriment of the rhythm, here never stands out. We never are left with the impression of a director backing himself into corners.
But going this far with the Straub-Huillet comparison isn’t just because of a couple of formal resemblances, especially considering we are dealing here with a debuting director about whose influences one can only guess. No, it’s because the movie, following its own path, never burying itself under its references, is also a reflection on encounters. Other than the diegetic shooting of the film — which is doubled by another manual activity in which the entire family takes part, the reform of their lake house — the plot invests in an encounter the director has with a dog in the forest.
This event come at the film’s beginning. An animal jumps out of nowhere in front of the director’s car; he gets out to look for it and finds a dog crying inside a tunnel. He reaches with his hand, very slowly; and when he’s about to touch its face, it runs away in fright. He leaves a plate of food nearby and is able to attract it a few days later. He takes it home, cares — with the help of a relative — for the injury, then names it with the help of that young family member. The director’s first encounter with the cop barely engendered a to leave his mouth; this encounter with a dog takes up most of the movie.
They name her (Lija), they take her to the lake, they live with her. As they carry wooden planks and tools, Lija runs around their legs, eats grass, gets put inside. But she never wears a leash. And so, after she eats the deceased mother’s diary and is scolded by the director, she runs away. They search for her in the forest, near the lake, they yell out her name: she doesn’t appear. The movie draws to its end and Lija still hasn’t been found. But this isn’t a suspense story. On the road again, the director — played by Wind, Talk to Me‘s director Stefan Đorđević, just as his actual relatives play themselves here — runs into her, standing at a crossroad as if waiting for him. He walks up to her very calmly; she, too, is his real-life dog. The movie ends with a long shot of his mother in bed talking about the wind; what she says could have come from a Straub-Huillet interview — but it didn’t.
Comments are closed.