Walkover
There’s something deeply mysterious surrounding Skilmowski’s formal approach. The film consists of a series of seamless long takes with some indelible reframings. There is an internal speed to the overall project. The camera tracks the main character and glides past his surroundings. But these surroundings and people are not erased by the camera movements. Instead, they poke pores of fiction that collide with the main character’s own fiction; something major that occurred offscreen when the main character is occupied by his own business, and as he moves past this specific time and spot, he and this extraneous event come into brief contact until they disperse again. The story between the two central lovers plays out the same way for us viewers. For us, their first meeting takes place at the train station, and immediately, there is this feeling that there are these ancient histories – of betrayal, disappointments, regrets, pride – between the two that are buried deep within, inaccessible to the camera and to us. They may address it briefly, but never fully, so the apparatus of the moving camera does not devour their interiors, but only mutilates the spaces surrounding them.
Baby It’s You
I had a chance to experience this in theatre during TIFF’s John Sayles retrospective this month. Unfortunately, I only managed to catch one other film from this retrospective: Matewan. Rosanna Arquette is incredible and extremely beautiful in this. During the post-screening Q&A, Adam Nayman and Sayles agreed that the camera loves her, particularly in the reaction shot of her looking at the bulletin board, which Michael Balhaus designed to make her eyes sparkle at a very precise moment. The movie itself, despite being an anomaly in Sayles’s filmography as a studio production, feels special amongst the myriad high school coming-of-age romances because one can seriously feel the heft of time across the narrative that gradually approaches the central couple and traps them within its orbit. It’s apparent in the sequence shots that pan across Jill’s college dorm room, or the static wide shot that observes Jill and Sheik saying goodbye after a date, and of course it can be found in that final sequence, capturing a gesture both permanently frozen in time and devastating because we all know that moment can never actually be permanent. What feels truly devastating is time unveiling itself through the mise-en-scéne.
A Nos Amour
Recently I watched several works from Maurice Pialat. In his post on Loulou, Bruno Andrade remarks that Pialat constructs certain emotional moments with the same skill as Hitchcock does in his murder scenes. I can’t think of a clearer example of that than the dinner scene towards the end of A Nos Amours. See how different eyelines align in the same shot with multiple faces, but only one is talking, or how it cuts to a behind-the-shoulder shot at the precise moment, at the exact angle. To extend the analogy with Hitchcock further, the slap in Pialat’s films feel like a murderous stab, not a violent provocation towards the audience, or an overtly theatrical gesture like some reviews I saw, but more like a rupture in the flow of motion – similar to how a cut to a hand wielding a knife would be in a Hitchcock film – that particularly suits the realism Pialat is aiming for. And also speaking of eyelines meeting, the final scene is one of the most mysterious and magical moments I’ve seen in a film, and I’ll be thinking about it for a long time.
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