L (Carolina Miragaia) lives between two worlds: Bangkok and Lisbon. Apparently far, they are not as distant as someone would imagine. They are both colourful, vibrant, ancient and mesmerizing. The images of these two cities intersect, blur, and swap. Until the spectator forgets the spatial temporal unity they are so used to, and naturally dives into this flowless private narration of becoming. BAAN is the first narrative future by Portuguese director Leonor Teles. As a cinematographer, she recently collaborated with director João Canijo on the movie Bad Living which won the Silver Bear at the 73rd Berlinale. In 2016, she won a Golden Bear at Berlin International Film Festival for her short movie Batrachian’s Ballad (Balada de um Batráquio), which creativelyexplores the condition of the Roma community in today’s Portugal. BAAN comes from an urge to understand how relationships can scar us brutally. The plot is only secondary to the natural unfolding of everyday life and the rise and decline of a new relationship between two young women. BAAN premiered at the 76th Locarno Film Festival, taking place in Switzerland between the 2nd and 12th of August 2023.
L is embracing a simple life. The camera follows her everywhere, like a silent testimony of her routine. She goes to work in an architecture office, has drinks with colleagues, sketches something on a block in her room, watches the sunset from a terrace, walks the city alleys, and eats ice cream in a yellow bar. Then L meets K (Meghna Lall) and it’s difficult to keep the two worlds apart. The attraction is obvious. But there is also fear; fear of getting hurt, once again. The past is there: L breaking up with her former partner, K feeling displaced in the UK as in Canada. Nevertheless, L and K slowly melt into one, as the ice cream they eat the first time they met on the street. And the camera starts following them together; at a friend’s dinner, when K shares her experience of being racialized because of her looks, when the two are racing through the night on a bike, sitting on a hill, and walking on a dock. Until K disappears. And L’s routine starts all over again, vailed with heavy blue.
Those images of a romantic breezy summer make the spectator wants to jump straight into it. To be in K and L place, or actually to be them. A praise goes to the two actresses, Miragaia and Lall, who effortlessly succeed in rendering presence and absence so complementary that one cannot but urge to feel that excitement, that blessing, that thrill. Until K disappears. And L’s routine starts all over again, vailed with heavy blue. (This sentence is used before in the previous paragraph.) BAAN is a delicate but honest study on how to survive the end of a relationship when love is still there. The need for a person is rather physical, something that keeps the protagonist from functioning properly. Sleeping, eating, socializing, and working all seem challenging tasks when nowhere feels good and when none of them feels like home. Because BAAN, which means “home” in Thai, is where L belongs, with K. Because the usual places of her routine are foreign without K next to her, inhabiting them.
Shot in what at times seems overexposed film of a grainy texture, BAAN gives the feeling of watching a home movie, recalling the memory of a summer love. The dialogues are realistic and sometimes so fragmented that they are hard to get. But until the end, where one significant conversation finally takes place, they are also irrelevant. Because the tone of the voice, the gestures, the expression, the posture, and the messages are more telling than anything. And this is exactly what director Teles does so well. She shows what cannot be described with words. She gives shapes to feelings and translates them into images. The other thing director Teles succeeds in, is making racism visible by naming it and showing how it profoundly affects its victims. In the background of K’s experiences, there is an echo of the anti-Asian racism wave that exploded during the Corona pandemic, but is deeply rooted in Western societies. In BAAN, Teles tries to remind the public of it, by inviting them to reflect on the scars it left on the communities it affects. BAAN will stay as an everlasting memory.
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