“Justa”, by Teresa Villaverde
She says: “My mother melted into the asphalt.” She is 10 years old, we don’t know that her name is Justa. The film has been started for more than half an hour, however, and she is one of the characters.
Characters? Figures rather, like Justa’s father, this man with a terribly burned face, who comes in the evening to read books on wildlife with her. Like the young woman, a psychiatrist, who accompanies the inhabitants of this region, and the young man with devastated feet who persists in playing football, or the elderly woman who we understand has lost both her husband and her sight.
This region of Portugal is itself seriously injured, badly burned. Months before, a terrible fire ravaged it, as now happens every summer, in this country and many others. When it burns particularly hard, here or there, in Europe or North America, we talk about it on the news. We see large flames, black smoke invades the sky. And after? Afterwards, the news will be elsewhere.
In essence, the film by Portuguese filmmaker Teresa Villaverde also tells of this general amnesia, this collective ignorance towards a fact that is nevertheless obvious: so-called “natural” disasters, even if we know that humans are largely responsible for them (but not necessarily the humans who are victims of them), are not just spectacular one-off events. These are long-term tragedies.
Justa, Mariano, Lucia, Simão, Elsa and the others are incarnations of it, each in their own way. Like also this valley, this tree trunk that the blind woman caresses, this cemetery against which the boy bounces his ball, this stream that the filmmaker films as she films faces.
Justa is not a documentary, the scenes are played, we perceive it well. And yet, through their sensitive attention, their assembly which arouses echoes and imagination, these scenes which at first seem disjointed bear witness. They bear witness to a pain, a sometimes insurmountable necessity to deal with what has fallen on the lives of these people.
The beauty, the gentleness, the quality of listening with which Teresa Villaverde films these beings in whom, very differently, a fire continues to burn, a pain continues to resonate beyond what is shown and what is said express a larger world, a broader drama.
The composition of shots devoid of human presence – leaves on the surface of the water, two half-empty glasses of wine on a table – and yet inhabited, or bursts of voices which summon other possible stories, suggest that we only ever have access to fragments of what makes up the existence of beings and communities.
A poem haunted by presences, living or not, human or not, the film is infinitely attentive to the singularity of situations, to the detail of experiences and their effects in relationships with others – the psychologist’s companion, the old woman’s daughter – who move away or close off, others who will not be judged for all that.
This makes up a landscape whose skin-deep and intimate singularity applies to the atrocious ordeal endured by the inhabitants of this particular region, in their singularity, and applies to the long-term pain of the victims of so many other catastrophes, by fire, by water, by war.
Justa don’t preach anything, Justa welcomes its spectators with the same benevolent gentleness as its protagonists. Without pretension to reconciliation, the film, through a sort of material and emotional grace, through its way of showing a damaged face, a young man’s hand which takes an old woman’s hand, creates something common, shareable between those who are shown, those whose fate is thus evoked and those who will see the ninth feature film by a filmmaker who has found with this one an authentic cinematic response to the misfortunes of the world.
“Orwell: 2+2=5”, by Raoul Peck
From the former Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, to whom he dedicated two films, to the American writer James Baldwin (I Am Not Your Negro) and the South African photographer Ernest Cole, Raoul Peck’s cinema frequently relies on key figures to construct questions concerning both the present and the historical situations directly concerned. It is the same with this production, half pamphlet, half essay, based on the existence of the British author George Orwell and his most famous book, 1984.
Orwell: 2+2=5 interweaves the story of the life of George Orwell, since his discovery of colonialist crimes in Burma and his engagement during the Spanish War (1936-1939), but especially his last years, marked by the installation of the writer and journalist in the Scottish island of Jura, where he established an autarkic mode of existence, breaking with the essentials of social life, and the way in which his final novel anticipates contemporary excesses, under the signs combined with the rise of fascistic authoritarianism and the manipulation of language and information.
To this end, Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck assembles images of different types: photos and films showing fascism, Nazism and Stalinism, fragments of screen adaptations of 1984 and of Animal Farm and other films less directly linked to George Orwell, shots made expressly to illustrate the point, current screenshots with appearances of the potentates – Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi, Xi Jinping, etc. – who control most of the planet.
This circulation, accompanied by a voice-over which replaces George Orwell, seeks to echo the totalitarianisms identified as such, the finesse of the analyzes of the author ofHomage to Catalonia (1938) on the uses of language by these regimes, the way in which his great dystopian novel was staged and the current manipulations, common to crimes against the mind committed by advertising, political communication and social networks under the influence of algorithms modeled by the masters of today’s world.
The film underlines the continuity between these crimes against the mind, against language, against logic, against science (exemplified by the famous “2+2=5”, an obsessive totalitarian motif in 1984) and mass crimes, ongoing massacres, genocides, from the Gaza Strip to the collapse of biodiversity.
Almost simultaneously with the release of the film, the French translation of a brief text published by George Orwell in 1946, three years before, appeared.
1984, Politics and languagetranslated by Mehdi Ouraoui. This underlines in his preface what Raoul Peck depicts, when he says of George Orwell that“he observes the mechanisms by which language serves to conceal reality rather than to illuminate it” and shows its sinister effectiveness in the service of dictatorships of multiple forms.
In continuation of this pamphlet, as well as 1984,
but also of the entire existence and work of the author and anti-fascist and anti-Stalinist fighter George Orwell, the Haitian filmmaker also works to make visible the concrete and murderous effects of what today’s dominant powers do to languages.
“5 centimeters per second”, by Yoshiyuki Okuyama
The speed mentioned by the title would be that of the falling cherry blossom petals. In spring, then. It would also be that of falling snowflakes. The film will be this circulation, between a spring (of childhood loves) and a winter (of adult lives), around twenty years later. This simple story gradually emerges from the succession of scenes which at first appear to have no explicit connection, while we accompany sometimes the computer scientist Takaki, sometimes the bookseller Akari.
Much of the charm of 5 centimeters per second lies in the way in which the exchanges between each of these characters and those around them are valuable in themselves – humor, tenderness, sense of detail – without us needing to immediately know how to connect them to the main plot, or even more so because we are not trying to do so.
The same goes for the echoes and contrasts between what happened in 1991 and what we see from 2008, the year of the film “in the present”. Takaki and Akari, teenagers of around twelve years, loved each other very much before the constraints of existence separated them. What he and she have become mixes contrasts and reminiscences of this founding moment, while the suspense of their possible reunion and the muffled traces of their great passion of yesteryear emerge.
It does not matter much to know that 5 centimeters per second was first a great success of the Japanese anime directed by Makoto Shinkai in 2007, of which the young Japanese director Yoshiyuki Okuyama does more than give a version here liveweaving the three successive episodes of the original work into a single story. Anyone who knows this will especially see the very successful visual transpositions of the graphics specific to Japanese animation, particularly with regard to landscapes, the famous cherry trees, a tree under the snow, railway tracks, etc.
Yoshiyuki Okuyama’s second feature film clearly benefits from his main practice, photography, to find an identity for this sentimental melodrama assuming a naivety without silliness for its main narrative thread.
Thanks to its lightness of touch, 5 centimeters per second convinces by the finesse of the relationships, especially between each of the protagonists and those around them, both during the time of childhood love and that of a dotted adult life. He finds the right tone through his discreet invention of forms borrowed from the drawings that gave birth to them, but reconfigured to a singular point of balance between stylization and realism.
