“Laughter and the knife”, by Pedro Pinho
Showed in the A certain Look section, which will rarely fully fulfilled its discovery function of new ways of filming, the third fictional feature film of the Portuguese Pedro Pinho was one of the events of the last Cannes Festival.
Still to discover, this director is in fact not completely unknown. Failing to have been able to see on French screens Amanhã will be Outro Dia (but all hope is not lost), we remember at least that the memorable The factory of nothing had been shown in 2017 to the fifteen filmmakers, then distributed.
But we continue to know little more about this director, as much as on this casual olibrius who goes in socks and hands in the pockets in the middle of the desert, after having crossed a customs officer who demanded a book to read for any prebend. The tone is set, everything remains to be discovered.
The olibrius is called Sergio. He landed in an African capital. It is unknown first where, but people speak, among others, Portuguese. He is sent by an NGO to make a report that seems likely to disturb a lot of people. A wave threat hovers.
Sergio will meet men, women, less precisely defined humans. African, Brazilian, European, in town and in the countryside, in offices and in bistros, in the bush and in the desert.
By his side, we will move, laugh, dance, kiss furiously, risk his skin, fight, flee, lie. Understand and not understand. The country is Guinea-Bissau, its violent colonial past, its struggle for heroic and tragic independence, its misery and its vitality, the incandescent and opaque fusion of a multitude of inheritances.
As inconvenient to an immediate meaning as its title drawn from a song that plays its role too, the film follows Sergio, but also a band of trans and quaers of all colors. And among Iels, Gui, inhabited by lucid and worried, erotic and combative knowledge, be of several lives and several genres.
But there is also, Surgie in Deviable, reappeared as a seducer, as a loyal girl, as a resistant, Diara, the adventurer with the face decorated with jewelry and a lightning cheek, a small fragile businesswoman and a great warrior of her survival.
With Sergio, a humanitarian and poet, a postmodern tintin, you have to go see rice plantations-in danger of dryness or submersion-and a site at the end of the world led by ex-colons, or their descendants, and where proto-esclaves are necessarily raw, even if completely African.
Africans, what is it? The film does not know, but it multiplies, laughing, crying, by being fashing, shuddering with desire, the ways of asking the question, on the edge of sensuality, at the corner of avenue Fanon and avenue Guevara. With politics, economics, sex, fear, exoticism and hatred of exoticism, you have to make cinema. So the film does it. And it’s staggering.
It lasts three and a half hours. Each plan is a marvel and their arrangement, jumps in time and in the story are like dance steps to better capture secret signs, unknown scent. When it stops, we would like it to continue.
“Youth (return to the country)”, by Wang Bing
Third part of the trilogy devoted to young people from the campaign to work in the making workshops of Zhili, the city of East Chinese with 14,000 micro-enterprises of textile production, Youth (return to the country) Find this multitude of endless boys and girls who are endlessly riveted to their sewing machines or transbahtating huge bundles of clothing.
And immediately, the two characteristics that made the power so moving to the Spring and Tormentsthe first two parts of Youth: the singularity of each person in this maelström; And the sensitivity to energy which inhabits each and everyone and which never encloses them in any simplification or miserable condescension.
But Return to the country Go even further in the richness of proposals, by inscribing the frenzied activism of workers engaged in the extreme adventure of building the possibility of a future, according to a double movement, spatial and temporal.
Shot for three years, the film accompanies the cyclical return of the family reunion of the New Year, a major moment in the life of almost all of the billion and a half of Chinese. For the workers and workers of Zhili, this “return to the country”, the only time they and they leave the workplace, more than punctuate the year.
Bringing the funds necessary for the trip, organizing ceremonies – marches, funeral rituals – solving problems with other family members, neighbors or authorities transform this episode into a complex, dangerous pivot. Including to cover snowy and smashed roads through the mountains.
The assembly makes this pendulum movement sensitive between the Shanghai region where they work and the poor provinces – and distant – of Yunnan (south of China) and anhui (east of the country), where the characters are from. Thus consists the singular geometry of Return to the country, Annual cycle, translation in space, linear movement towards a future -walking future.
This geometry is tremendously embodied, concrete. The multiplicity of conflicts, seductions, reunions, meetings, the diversity of landscapes or food and clothing uses nourishes a rich material that is both documentary and dramatic, sparkling with emotions, anger, joys, desires.
Individual trajectories, couples that are formed, births and deaths, local fights against corruption on the scale of a village which is nonetheless violent, uncertainty of the next day and robustness of cultural frameworks, hardness of living conditions and as the case hardness or formidable warmth of human relationships: it takes an exceptional art of filming and assembly to compose, in a fluid movement, heroes and heroines.
Often alone with his camera, Wang Bing confirms the immensity of his talent as a witness and narrator, an observer available and a creative artist, by succeeding in keeping people and situations in their particularity, where constantly tenderness and brutality, hopes and realism, physical activities and games of seduction, challenges, control.
With Return to the countrythese are work and family, traditions and living conditions, the present and duration, what is changing and what is repeated, this young woman precisely, of these two friends, of a couple who forms, of a hostile father, of a mother at the end of the roll, of a siblings that argue.
When they move, the camera moves, run if necessary. When you have to wait, listen, it poses and waits. Voices, words, noise, laughter and complaints are a concrete and exciting symphony. The most impressive, the most joyful, the most disturbing is the way in which these multiple particular streams – and considered in their particularities – make the common river which would be the film and which is life itself.
