El Sur

EL SUR   ***1/2

Víctor Erice

1983

IDEA:  In northern Spain in the late 1950s, a girl learns about her father's mysterious past as she comes of age.

BLURB:  The first image of El Sur, like so many of the film’s chiaroscuro-carved tableaux, is illuminated only gradually, whispering from the darkness. The source is the light of dawn filling a girl’s bedroom, but it could just as well be a projector’s lightbulb firing up, or the waxing flame that casts shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave. The stylized images conjured by Erice and Alcaine self-reflexively entwine memory and cinema, calling back to some irrecoverable past that only exists in hazy representations. For the young Estrella, those things beyond the threshold of legibility become imagos; particularly, a father who seems to possess magic, and the mysterious South from which he hails that seemingly holds the key to family unity and self-actualization. But any imaginary is built on an opposition of presence and absence, something Estrella comes to understand in the way her father fetishizes a famous movie star as a proxy for a lost love. Rifts personal and political define the narrative and poetics of El Sur, whose post-Civil War setting rumbles with generational tensions between children and their patriarchs, nations and their leaders. Estrella is older by the end of the film, but in many ways she’s as she was at the beginning: a girl at literal and metaphorical dawn, grasping toward a light that will never fully chase away the dark.

Red Island

RED ISLAND   ***

Robin Campillo

2023

IDEA:  A young French-Algerian boy grows up on a military base in Madagascar during the waning days of French occupation. 

BLURB:  A Bildungsroman hinges on a matter of perspective; particularly, the widening purview of a young protagonist who slowly comes to understand the complexities of the adult world into which they’re entering. With an emphasis on loss of innocence, these kinds of coming-of-age stories often take place within the context of war, injustice, or domestic unrest, all things present within the postcolonial setting of Red Island. On the titular island, eight-year-old Thomas bears witness to the erosion of national and familial stability. Like Terence Davies’s surrogate child protagonist in his semi-autobiographical The Long Day Closes, Robin Campillo’s proxy in his own auto-fiction is a queer-coded boy who peers endlessly at the straight world from a distance, glimpsing heterosexual, masculinist rituals from behind dimpled glass and through the slats of a crate. He’s also a young French-Algerian living in Madagascar, making his status one of multiple liminality. Thomas’s sphere of influence is a jumbled one, inhabited by a military father on one hand and a crime-fighting girl from a superhero comic on the other. Campillo excels in locating the disquieting juxtapositions that emerge for Thomas in this strange land, whether through a series of match cuts that link an aragonite table with aerial military views of Madagascar, a Christmas party taking place in a hangar, or a screening of Abel Gance’s Napoleon on a tropical beach at night. Similar to Claire Denis’ White Material, Campillo’s Red Island considers French colonialism in Africa from a place of lived autobiographical ambivalence, mostly through the experiences of the colonizers. But in its final act, a bold structural turn expunges the white characters and cedes the ground to the Malagasy people. It’s a necessary and elating narrative tradeoff in a film that welcomes the inevitability - and importance - of attaining a wider perspective.