The Flip Side of the Coin: March 2021

Over the past twelve years, Anocha Suwichakornpong has developed one of the more elusive and protean bodies of work on the festival circuit. Seven years after her auspicious debut, Mundane History (2009), a destabilizing, achronological story of the burgeoning friendship between a sullen upper-class young man and the male nurse taking care of him, she made one of the most notable breakout features of the decade. 2016’s By the Time It Gets Dark begins as an examination of Thailand’s history of student resistance to dictatorship before pinwheeling off to form a dense network of embodied memories, parallel lives, and metafictions. Her next feature, Krabi, 2562, a 2019 collaboration with Ben Rivers, pared back some of these impulses in favor of a documentary hybrid dedicated to the exploration of the eponymous island. Now, with her new feature Come Here, which premieres in the Forum section of this year’s Berlin Film Festival, Anocha has opted for what appears at first glance to be an even slighter approach, albeit one that conceals a whole host of complexities. Running a slender sixty-eight minutes (including five minutes of credits), the film principally follows a group of four theatre actors from Bangkok, who embark on a getaway to a remote forest. Their stay is almost deliberately desultory and brief, mostly spent on what looks like a floating cabin docked on a river, as they drink, sunbathe, and engage in conversations that very slowly dole out initially withheld background information. Towards the end of the film, the actors stage this journey in a black-box setup, constructing a set of the cabin and recreating their conversations and activities almost word for word. Intertwined with this is a narrative as deliberately abstruse as the main plot is straightforward, focusing on a young researcher who appears to be undergoing a similar journey as the actors. However, this trip is much more eventful and marked with a mysterious tropical malady, complete with a startling morphing effect. Such a summary doesn’t quite convey the strangeness of Come Here, and of Anocha’s approach to the material. She largely avoids intercutting of these storylines, letting them play out in discrete chunks, and storylines and even characters float in and out of their own narratives; at one point, one of the actors even pops up in the same scene as the young woman without explanation. Shooting in 1.33:1 and muted black-and-white, Anocha generally favors long shots, but her technique varies, going so far as to include a few split screens along the middle of the y-axis of the frame, which let vast swaths of trees bleed into a city landscape, or enable a projection of one of the actors in the forest to shadow an image of her sleeping in bed. That visualization of realities blending into each other helps illuminate the concealed thrust of Come Here, as does a protracted centerpiece scene where the actors imitate animals to the point of macho exhaustion. Both narratives, in their intimations of fluid identities — both performed and genuine — clashing with quotidian realities, propose the forest as a realm of possibility and mystery, where performance can allow a person to move into a baser form of existence, something which the actors try to recapture in some form back in the city. Of course, this is not a novel framework, but what distinguishes Anocha’s approach is the deliberate deemphasis of this, almost to the point of imperceptibility. This can result in a somewhat hazy, unsatisfying experience of viewing, particularly in how loosely defined the characters can feel. But Come Here certainly feels of a piece with Anocha’s previous work, particularly in how difficult it is to pin down, and how it seems to transform in the mind. The surface pleasures are certainly there, but always, whether in the wild disjunctions or unexpected aesthetic developments, there is the suggestion of something lurking just below the water.

Monday, March 1, 2021

A River Runs, Turns, Erases, Replaces

Complete first draft written for In Review Online.

At this present stage in the coronavirus pandemic, when the perception is that things are swiftly getting better both in the United States and around the world, it is no surprise that the first of presumably numerous documentaries devoted to the topic have begun to arrive. These are largely works that adhere to the common conception of documentary filmmaking as that of conveying some objective truth, of capturing moments and answering questions about how this series of calamities happened. While this can indeed result in incisive and interesting work, it is by no means the only means of engagement, especially with a topic as all-encompassing as COVID-19. To help fill that gap, there is Shengze Zhu’s A River Runs, Turns, Erases, Replaces, which premieres in the Forum section of this year’s Berlin Film Festival. Her last film was the daring and compassionate Present.Perfect. (2019), which solely used footage from various Chinese livestreamers in order to capture new, developing forms of self-expression and connection for the marginalized, and with River Runs, she applies that same precision and rigor to an even more contemporary topic. Zhu herself is from Wuhan, the Chinese city where novel coronavirus was first discovered, and where the entirety of River Runs is filmed, but any preconceptions of an exposé or explainer piece are quickly dispelled with the opening sequence, comprised of seven minutes of traffic camera footage from February 8-April 4, 2020, showing the gradual progression from total lockdown to comparative bustle. This is as close as Zhu comes to showcasing a governmental response to the crisis, and indeed coronavirus/COVID-19 is never mentioned by name in the entire film. Instead, River Runs takes place in the aftermath, or what one might deem the aftershocks of such a widespread crisis. Eschewing the dominant close-ups and constant patter of her previous film, Zhu only uses extreme long shots which contain no dialogue whatsoever, filming numerous locales within Wuhan. She especially focuses on large-scale construction, towering bridges, and above all the banks of the Yangtze river, which floods near the end of the film. With a few exceptions, all of the locations are largely empty, with solitary figures dwarfed in the frame, as much a result of Zhu’s camera angles as of a general social distancing decree: in one scene a soccer match can be heard just off screen, and the players and the ball occasionally intrude at the very bottom of the frame. In what might seem like an “objective” mix of cityscapes, River Runs introduces a devastating device, presenting four letters written by Zhu and based on true stories from four grieving people, addressed to a husband, a grandmother, a father, and an older brother, respectively, all of whom died from coronavirus. These letters are presented silently, placing a line of handwritten Chinese characters on screen one at a time, each detailing the often-mundane sadness with which each person is dealing, one that extends into such mundane moments as chopping a chicken or swimming in the river. The third letter in particular is presented in a different manner, in typed-out characters, and provides such a clear purpose for the documentary — the writer was unaware of her father’s affinity for the very bridges that form such a large bulk of the construction and backdrops — that I thought that it was Zhu’s own story. While this is not the case, it goes some way in detailing the ache of the film, the emotion that infuses the lonely, decaying buildings and shores. Through it all, the rapid development that epitomizes China in the 21st century continues, and it’s entirely to Zhu’s credit that she refuses to graft on the hopelessly tangled politics of this pandemic, to lean into unthinking praise or sprawling critique. Instead, she burrows to the heart of the daily struggle, the loneliness and discomfort with which the vast majority of people have been living in this crisis. By mapping that onto the specifics of a central city and its inhabitants, River Runs charts the present state of existence with stunning, heartbreaking clarity.