Part of my coverage of the 55th Chicago International Film Festival.
GHOST TROPIC **1/2
Bas Devos
2019
IDEA: After falling asleep on the train and missing her stop, a cleaning lady must find her way back home at night.
BLURB: A becalmed, nocturnal city symphony, Ghost Tropic envisions Brussels at night as a place where subordinated people and histories become centered, alive to the city that regards them at day as phantoms. It’s the domain of immigrant laborers like the Muslim Khadija, who, removed from the bustle of the urban workday, is able to see her adopted hometown for what it really is: a community propped up on the unrecognized contributions of those living and toiling in the margins. When she misses her train stop on the way back from work, she is not geographically or culturally lost. Rather, in her alternating aloneness and civic communion, she is at one with an environment she knows as well as anyone. Through Grimm Vandekerckhove’s ethereal 16mm cinematography, the roads and buildings around her seem to buzz with enchanted life; pools of light and color animate the darkness, flaring at the edges of the frame or shimmering in wet pavement, turning streetlamps into otherworldly sentinels. Ghost Tropic is visually spellbinding, and while this is often enough to carry its lean, ambient minimalism, there is also the sense that such immaculate aestheticism has smothered some of its narrative and affective range. This might be why Khadija often comes across as more of a static concept than a flesh-and-blood person, the film’s phlegmatic tone and texture tending to iron out any emotional kinks. The images here are suitably gorgeous and insinuating, but they might have gained impact if feelings of equal depth had greater room to peek through.
BLURB: A becalmed, nocturnal city symphony, Ghost Tropic envisions Brussels at night as a place where subordinated people and histories become centered, alive to the city that regards them at day as phantoms. It’s the domain of immigrant laborers like the Muslim Khadija, who, removed from the bustle of the urban workday, is able to see her adopted hometown for what it really is: a community propped up on the unrecognized contributions of those living and toiling in the margins. When she misses her train stop on the way back from work, she is not geographically or culturally lost. Rather, in her alternating aloneness and civic communion, she is at one with an environment she knows as well as anyone. Through Grimm Vandekerckhove’s ethereal 16mm cinematography, the roads and buildings around her seem to buzz with enchanted life; pools of light and color animate the darkness, flaring at the edges of the frame or shimmering in wet pavement, turning streetlamps into otherworldly sentinels. Ghost Tropic is visually spellbinding, and while this is often enough to carry its lean, ambient minimalism, there is also the sense that such immaculate aestheticism has smothered some of its narrative and affective range. This might be why Khadija often comes across as more of a static concept than a flesh-and-blood person, the film’s phlegmatic tone and texture tending to iron out any emotional kinks. The images here are suitably gorgeous and insinuating, but they might have gained impact if feelings of equal depth had greater room to peek through.
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