|
Chantal Akerman opens on a reverse Lumière panel, a train pulling into the frame from the lower-right corner and turned-away passengers descending the platform stairs, then a single figure strolling into the phone booth at the back of the deep-focus screen. Europe as symmetrical waiting-room, the réalisatrice (Aurore Clément) glides through it. Essen is a brief view of the theater where she's showing her film and an extended tour of the hotel room she's staying in, a fine gag has a discarded tie in the closet interrupting a two-hour wait for a phone call. The square-jawed teacher (Helmut Griem) has a little Fassbinder tale ("My wife left me for a Turk. A very dark type") and a lament for German history, he outlines them before his daughter's birthday party in industrial Bottrop. The Polish friend (Magali Noël) has a lovelorn son at home and a grain of envy, along the way to Brussels there's the fellow nomad (Hans Zischler) whose wanderlust is dissipating. "Anyway, you've got to live somewhere." Akerman understands that a good director is a good listener, her surrogate takes in monologues from each companion as if absorbing unmade movies. The wanderer almost smiles with her mother (Lea Massari), who dons furs and keeps articles of her daughter's work in her handbag—side by side in bed for a remembrance of a Sapphic brush, it's the warmest bond in a land of detachment. The gray urban roar that can invade a sealed-off chamber, a symphony of doors sliding open and shut, the pure cinema of watching the world from a train window. In Paris, a Wenders composition (night lights through glass pane, flickering TV set) and une chanson to brighten the dispirited lover (Jean-Pierre Cassel), finally the terror of realizing that your most stable relationship is with the answering machine. "To be a disembodied voice, and yet the voice of a human soul..." (Symons) Cinematography by Jean Penzer.
--- Fernando F. Croce |