Review: We Are Little Zombies Is a Fun, Wildly Stylized Portrait of Grief – slantmagazine

In the opening narration to his documentary Mon Amour, David Teboul recalls a message that his former lover, Frdric, sent him in the middle of the night before taking his life: Its crazy how many things we must invent to keep us from just eating, shitting, and sleeping. The great organizer of these many things we invent to convince ourselves to be something more than mere organisms is the belief in love. That, anyway, is the idea that organizes Mon Amour as Teboul travels from his native France to Siberia in order to interview locals about their experiences with love, as a way to mourn the end of his own love story.

What Teboul finds in Siberia is quite disheartening: that love, when it materializes in the figure of the lover, burns fast, and what seemed like a panacea to make our miserable world a livable place turns into the poison we call domesticity. Lovers become enemies we cant get rid of. But the little bit of love thats saved in the ashes of the deflated mirage that once promised to save us is once in a while rekindled through Tebouls prodding as he interviews elderly couples who seem to articulate their feelings for the first time in ages.

The very dispositions of these individuals mimic the abyss between what was once a prospect of a pleasurable life and the crude reality of vodka and violence that replaced it. In the rare moments when someone sings the praises of togetherness, they do so by looking down or away, as if addressing their own partners when speaking about love would mean losing the little bit of honor they have left after putting up with so much betrayal.

Although Teboul interviews young people, too, the strongest portraits are those of the elderly, who, on some level, take advantage of their cinematic moment to air their grievances and, once in a while, admit gratitude. A very old-looking woman in her mid-60s who lost her sight from reading too much Pushkin late at night tells us that any other man would surely have left her long ago, but not her husband, who senses when shes awake in the middle of the night, makes her tea, and tells her that if she dies he will follow her to the grave. Tebouls questions can be refreshingly unexpected. As when he asks the woman what her husbands favorite body part is. When she whispers the answer into his cute little mushroom ears, you sense that its the closest thing to an I love you that he will ever hear. We dont know if his eyes water as she praises his ears, for he looks down and away, before then heart-breakingly saying, The main thing is not to suffer, and not to make others suffer.

Teboul juxtaposes these portraits with digressions about his simultaneously wonderful and dismal times with Frdric. These reflections borrow from Hiroshima Mon Amour, which Teboul watched as a child and has haunted him ever since. Frdric, like Emmanuelle Rivas character in that film, was also from Nevers. In these poetic detours, we see barely lit naked bodies meant to represent Teboul and his ghostly lover, recalling the opening of Alain Resnaiss film. It often feels like these autobiographical avowals, plagued by unnecessary classical music, belong to a different film. But theyre symbolically important, if not indispensable, as if Teboul was offering a self-implicating gift in exchange for awakening the long dormant intimacies of strangers.

The absence of love, and our insistence on spending our entire lives looking for it anyway, is also at the core of Lynne Sachss Film About a Father Who. Sheffield Doc/Fest is screening several of Sachss documentaries on its streaming platform. For Film About a Father Who, Sachs spent over three decades amassing footage (from Super 8 to digital) of her father, an eccentric salesman from Utah who lived a Hugh Hefner kind of life, neglecting his children and hosting a different girlfriend almost every night at his official family home. Lots and lots of them got pregnant, which resulted in Sachs having what feels like hundreds of siblings, whose testimonials she collects here. Some didnt know who their father was until they were adults. Others, in order to protect themselves from so much hurt, still think of him as a kind of godfather.

The title of the film is an obvious play on Film About a Woman Who, Yvonne Rainers experimental masterpiece about heteronormativity and monogamy. Rainers approach is acerbic, perhaps even folkloric, in the sense that her film portrays one specific woman wallowing in the sinking boat of heterosexual coupledom at the same time that it tells the archetypal tale of heterosexual domesticity writ large. Sachss approach feels a lot less multi-layered. Film About a Father Who is so fast-paced and Sachss narration so detached, or literal, that it can seem more like an underdeveloped absurdist comedy as random siblings keep turning up out of nowhere to give a brief account of their contradicting feelings toward their father. One of Sachss many sisters recounts how their father was arrested for possession of weed when they were kids and how she didnt know whether to weep or jump with joy at the time. But the family constellation in Sachss film is so vast we never spend enough time with any one single relative to see them as something other than an element.

Theres a sort of North American pragmatic froideur in the film, also present in self-ethnographic films like Sarah Polleys Stories We Tell, that Rainer queers through stylistic experimentation, and that Teboul completely avoids by surrendering to melancholia with gusto. There isnt much of a point in self-ethnographies where filmmakers protect their vulnerability through intellectualization, or prod their family wounds with a 10-foot pole. At one point in her narration, Sachs tells her audience that Film About a Father Who isnt a portrait but, rather, her attempt to understand the asymmetry of my conundrum. The film is also shot in such a matter-of-fact manner that you may forget that the father is actually the filmmakers. It doesnt help that the father himself pleads the fifth on every question and Sachs often directs her camera elsewhere, toward her siblings, instead of letting it linger on the silent and sad remnants of an aging womanizer.

Alexandra Pianelli also captures aging bodies in The Kiosk, but in a very different fashion. Her film was entirely shot on her phone, which was mostly stuck to her head, and without her ever leaving the tiny area behind the cash register of her familys press kiosk in a posh area of Paris. We never see the world outside of Pianellis field of vision from her counter, and yet it feels like she shows us the entire mechanics of the contemporary world.

The films subjects are mostly the elderly regulars who seem to show up at the kiosk everyday, for magazines and for Pianellis company. Pianelli crafts a tale of hopeful pessimism about humans relationship to otherness by explaining the ecosystem of her tradenamely, the slow decline of the printing industry in France and how the physical circulation of ideas can be the only connection to the world for an aging population that doesnt master digital technology and for whom kiosks play the role of cafs, pubs, or even the analysts couch.

When filmmaker Pedro Costa said, at this years International Film Festival Rotterdam, that all one needs to make a great film is three flowers and a glass of water, not money, cars, and chicks, this is what he means: the colossal might of the cinematic image achieved through the scrappiest of means. The Kiosk is a master class in filmmaking resourcefulness. Pianelli paints a portrait of our times through simple drawings that she makes of her clients, makeshift props and miniature sets made out of cardboard, and the anachronic gadgets around her workstation: a cassette tape player, an early-19th-century clock, coin holders that bear her great-grandparents fingerprints, and the very publications that she sells. Pianellis no-nonsense voiceover glues these elements together with the stunning honesty of the unflappable young Parisian for whom difference is an existential aphrodisiac. Theres no affectedness here. Its as if a refined cinematic object accidently emerged on the road to her making an artisanal project for the sheer pleasure of making something out of dead time.

Pianelli humanizes the figure of the press kiosk clerk who, in turn, humanizes the strangers she comes across, from seniors who spend more time with her than with their own children to the Bangladeshi asylum seeker who goes to her for legal help. In one sequence, Pianelli witnesses a homeless man insistently offering his metro-ticket money to a bourgeois lady upset that the machine wont take her credit card. We also learn that the demographics of the clientele per day of the week is contingent on what kinds of publications come out on which day, as well as which niche newspapers are the most anti-Semitic, anti-Arab, or pro-monarchy.

Pianelli lets the serious emerge but doesnt dwell on it. Seriousness often comes wrapped up in quirkiness and play, as when she plays a guessing game with the audience, telling us what a random customer will buy before they open their months, solely based on what they wear, and always she gets it right. Men in suits and ties go for either the newspaper Le Figaro or Les Echos, while the well-coiffed ladies who don fur coats gravitate toward Voici, unless Kate Mosss ass is on the cover of a nearby fashion magazine.

At one point, Pianelli says that she considers herself a seller of dreams. By this she means that each magazine at the kiosk stokes a different fantasy, from a supermodel body to a nation without Arabs. But The Kiosk makes Pianelli a saleswoman of a very different sort. Instead of working as the intermediary between vulnerable denizens and the idealized images that tease and haunt them, she cobbles a much more original fantasy through the bodies they actually have. The kiosk becomes the prototype for the most utopian vision of the public library, or any old space inhabited by a curious mindan ebullient infinity of poetry and care.

Sheffield Doc/Fests online platform will be available to all public audiences from June 10July 10.

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Review: We Are Little Zombies Is a Fun, Wildly Stylized Portrait of Grief - slantmagazine