Discussing the length of Avatar: The Way of Water’s runtime and some of its scenes that accomplish nothing other than looking beautiful, James Cameron said ‘“You’re absolutely correct, it doesn’t advance the plot. It’s doing something completely else. It’s allowing people to enjoy the moment.” When you’re watching an artistic film there’s often a fine line between or a continuum of boring and beautiful. Given enough time to stare at something the boring will become beautiful and the beautiful can make you sleepy. With nothing but time you can force the eyes of a willing or unwilling viewer (whether they’re in the right mood or not) to find the smaller details like a microscope. I’m happy to say that Here (now playing at the Berlin International Film Festival) falls mostly on the beautiful side. And it has a crisp non-punishing runtime.
Director Bas Devos opens the film with a group of construction workers in Belgium finishing their final day before a vacation in the summertime. Three of them ride on the back of a public bus. They all have incredibly kind, inviting faces. We could follow any of them, we don’t know which one it will be. The others get off the bus. It’s Stefan (Stefan Gota) we’re with, a worker from Romania. All this time off in front of him opens up a slow, dreamlike world. He might go back to Romania for his vacation. A childhood friend has ended up in jail. First, he goes to his clean apartment and kneels on the ground very flexibly in front of his fridge. He arranges the vegetables he has left along the length of his calves folded on the ground. He makes a soup with them that he will carry with him throughout his wanderings.
Stefan is a big wanderer. Not out of restlessness. More an innocent, softly intense curiosity. He ends up in community gardens, an autoshop owned by his countrymen, and the large hospital his sister works at. The soup comes with him inside a tupperware carried in a white plastic bag. The guys who work at the autoshop accept it and eat it with him on the bank of a river. I don’t know if I could say anything other than ‘no thank you’ to someone offering me homemade soup they’d been carrying in a plastic bag all day. But credit goes to Stefan’s friends who accept it without hesitation, heating it up on a portable gas burner in their office.
Cooked vegetables aren’t the only vegetation. Stefan himself wanders around like a plant searching for the sunlight. He finds himself on a bus with a handful of seeds. A stranger offers him some space in her communal plot to plant them but he politely turns her down.
Separate from him for now is Shuxiu (Liyo Gong). She’s a bryologist, a word I heard for the first time in this movie. She studies bryophytes, which are mosses, liverworts, and hornworts. Like Stefan, she’s a very nice person. She calls a student’s presentation magnificent. She stops to examine a little button of moss growing through the cracks in the sidewalks. She helps her aunt out at her Chinese food takeout restaurant.
The restaurant is where she and Stefan first cross paths. Everyone is always friendly and calm. The only conflict in the whole movie is maybe Stefan’s inner mulling over whether he should go back to Romania. The most tension comes when a delivery driver comes to pick up an order. The silent moment between Stefan and the driver is resolved by a curt greeting between the two. And even after the driver leaves, Stefan and Shuxiu empathize with him having to work in the rain.
It’s amazing how without much tension the movie manages to carry us along at its own gentle rhythm. Everyone’s nice and also everything is very clean and uncluttered: the apartment, the restaurant, Shuxiu’s office. At a cellular level, even the filthiest things are clean. Please take me away on your journey of love. It feels good. This movie makes me feel like I can feel the moss breathing, turning carbon dioxide into oxygen. And I can feel the breath between Shuxiu and Stefan as they are suddenly face to face, even if we can only see them from below the knee.
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