FIDMarseille 2023: The Night Drags On, The Curse, Undefined Things, & O Marinheiro

Marseille’s contradictions were particularly evident at this year’s Festival International du Cinéma Marseille, whose venues are located in the city’s loud, rundown, and graffiti-blanketed center. Not too long of a walk from the chaos one can find little oases of bourgeois indifference, from chic home décor shops to an Aztec-inspired Nikkei gastronomic haven. One doesn’t have to travel more than two feet from a festival screening to be confronted with a reality apparently unable to penetrate its air-conditioned theaters, at least not as patrons.

For one, it’s by and large privileged, white audience members who, following screenings, patronize the Blum brasserie, where festival talks are often held. There inside their hermetic bubble, as they sip on cappuccinos and nibble on pastries, it’s easy to imagine festival-goers indulging in discussions about injustice and decolonization while the racialized poor loiter outside, fundamentally alienated from it all. In the end, cinema’s propensity for porousness can denounce its own perverse structures, but what can it do about shifting them?

At this year’s FIDMarseille, Mathilde Girard introduced her film The Night Drags On with a philosophical anecdote involving famed psychoanalysts Melanie Klein and D.W. Winnicott before reflecting on the death of Nahel M., the 17-year-old recently shot by French police and whose death has triggered massive protests across the country. The situation was well-intentioned but awkward, considering those who were most directly concerned by the lethality of police brutality seemed almost barred—symbolically, architecturally, necropolitically—from hearing the filmmaker, considering her art, making their own films, even speaking.

Girard’s film, which won the festival’s Georges de Beauregard award, captures the curatorial line of FIDMarseille 2023: narratively risky films in the French Competition that make no concession to the audience’s ostensibly shortened attention spans. In The Night Drags On, two independent stories exist side by side: that of a woman engaged in an endless conversation with her taxi driver, both of whom are in no rush to arrive at their destination, and that of another woman stuck in her apartment, cutting fruit and watching nature documentaries.

As much as one may try to make a connection between these two worlds, their juxtaposition feels rather random, particularly because the sequences set within the taxi are so much more interesting than those set inside the apartment. Across The Night Drags On, Girard seems to suggest that opening oneself up to a stranger might be enough to endure the banality of life, and that speaking and truly listening are antidotes to alienation. The woman and the driver talk about frivolities that quickly gain an existential aura, and while we may perhaps think the driver has second intentions in mind—where is he really taking her?—the encounter is mostly about reciprocity in loneliness instead of the potential violence of alterity.

Another film that alternates storylines, or rather, points of view, is Maria Kaur Bedi and Satindar Singh Bedi’s uneven The Curse, which screened at the Vidéodrome, a small theater in the back of a charmingly grubby café. The filmmakers are real-life lovers ravaged by Singh Bedi’s alcoholism. The essay film features a series of eerily blurred, backlit images that could have easily existed without much of the voiceover narration throughout which Kaur Bedi addresses her frustrations over loving an addict and Singh Bedi presents an unvarnished account of what addiction does to a person’s psychic mechanisms. The addict doesn’t justify, he tells us. The addict doesn’t think. The addict drinks. And hides, mostly bottles.

Kaur Bedi’s interventions are sometimes useful, particularly when avowing her naïveté at the very start of the film, having lived an idyllic childhood in Switzerland, but her words often veer toward cliché. The true gravitas of the film comes from the disarming clarity of Singh Bedi’s testimony. We learn of a childhood where he and his alcoholic mother would get drunk in the back of movie theaters since he was seven years old, until the mother dies at the age of 31. The incestuous dysfunction of the family is harrowing, illuminating, and incredibly palpable. Though the film can be stifling, flirting as it does with redundancy, that’s most likely the point.

María Aparicio’s masterful Undefined Things is the perfect reminder of the singularity of cinema before the vulgarization of the moving image. Set in Córdoba, Argentina, this fiction film follows the painstaking work of Eva, a film editor, in the process of putting together a documentary that isn’t exactly about blindness, as she’s quick to say, but about blind people—the specific blind people captured on film stock by the documentary’s director. Eva, then, doesn’t believe a film should be thematic. It should go deep into the distinctiveness of its subjects, beyond their condition. The characters might be blind, but her goal is to craft a story that doesn’t reduce them to their “blindness,” discovering something else about them instead.

It’s difficult to describe the pleasure of watching Eva at work, or speaking of her craft to film students, except to say that it works as a kind of elixir as she pays the most sacred attention to the footage before her, waiting to be assembled and reassembled at her will. In Aparicio’s film, cinema is reinvented by Eva’s rigor, and safe from the hollowness of digitality’s seductive tricks. Undefined Things gives rise to the quiet and inspiring joys of witnessing someone who takes their practice seriously, as Eva engages in long conversations with her assistant, Rami, about the most minute, and as such most consequential, decisions about a cut, a concept, a rhythm.

Eva’s work feels sacred, and it takes over her life and being. Here, cinema becomes a way of living. But, mostly, cinema becomes a way of doing justice to the luxury of being able to see. Eva refuses to partake in that other kind of blindness—that of indifference to the political, and to the poetic. It’s difficult to remember a recent film this devoted to restoring the profundity of cinema—not as a product, but as a process—with such subtlety, respect, and elegance.

O Marinheiro, winner of the international Georges de Beauregard prize, is also interested in the limits, or limitlessness, of cinema, as filmmaker and musician Yohei Yamakado all but dares the audience not to leave the theater, overwhelmed by boredom. Yamakado takes us back to the wonderful textures of grainy film stock and the absence of synchronous sound in what is mostly a recitation of a text by renowned Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa set against black film stock.

In a decidedly different way than Undefined Things, O Marinheiro also proposes a cinema without bells and whistles, exposing the crudeness of what passes for moving images today. Though Yamakado teases us into thinking he will offer images to make Pessoa’s words more palatable, or more multi-sensorial, O Marinheiro is only briefly bracketed by actual images.

Those who make it to the end of the film may find themselves basking in the increasingly distant memory of the lighthouse imagery glimpsed at the start, which is followed by an unexplained sequence of a short-haired woman with deep blue eyes and a lovely buttoned-up blouse sitting down to paint and falling into a reverie. During the long narration of Pessoa’s poetry, we do see a very short-lived sepia-esque image of a closed door. It’s like a flash, reminding us of our dependence to seeing, to being distracted, to rejecting effort. And we hear some piano notes, which also deceive us into thinking a more accessible film will emerge.

False alarm. Pessoa, performed by a woman’s voice, is quickly back with his contemplation about a marooned seaman who imagines another nation for himself as a way to not suffer from nostalgia of his original motherland. And when a rescue boat finally arrives, the mariner is no longer there. It’s a very “FIDMarseille” provocation of an ending: bewildering and committed to cinema’s latent impenetrability. If only the actual theaters were more penetrable.

FIDMarseille runs from July 4—9.