Film Review
As if we haven't already had our fill of the unintended consequences of
the neo-conservatives' so-called 'war on terror', the war in
Afghanistan opens up into a whole new world of possibilities in
director Clément Cogitore's seductively creepy debut feature,
raising the intriguing prospect of a threat from another dimension that
makes even Al-Qaeda look tame. Enigmatically titled
Ni le ciel ni la terre (which ended
up as the ludicrously prosaic
The
Wakhan Front for its anglophonic release), Cogitore's singular
film owes as much to John Carpenter's
The Thing (1982) as it does to
The Blair Witch Project (1999)
and yet it manages to be unlike both of these films, or indeed any
other film with a supernatural bent that you would care to name.
Far from being a conventional fantasy thriller (a genre that is so rare
in French cinema as to be virtually non-existent),
Ni le ciel ni la terre provides an
eerie meditation on the metaphysical as it invites us to entertain the
possibility that there might well be hidden worlds existing alongside
ours - unseen, unheard worlds that contain the answers to all of the
unsolved mysteries of life (such as why biros and combs keep vanishing
without trace and why the best films never win Oscars).
Before taking the plunge and turning out what will probably go down as
the strangest French film of 2015 (it is almost certainly the most
original), Clément Cogitore served his directorial
apprenticeship by making half a dozen short films whilst pursuing a
career as a visual artist. Teaming up with screenwriter Thomas
Bidegain - who has co-scripted a fair number of Jacques Audiard films,
including
Un prophète (2009) and
De rouille et d'os (2012) -
Cogitore reworked some familiar concepts into an unsettlingly
unfamiliar film - one which subtly evokes similar fantasy offerings -
notably Paul Stanley's hauntingly unforgettable
Sole Survivor (1970) - whilst being
strikingly different in its tone and composition.
Avoiding the trap that has claimed many a first timer, Cogitore tacitly
refuses to adhere to genre conventions. Rather than pander to his
audience's expectations and roll out a succession of easy thrills, he
focuses more on the human angle, in particular how we mere mortals are
affected when our certainties about the world are whittled away and a
primal fear of the night begins to assert itself. There are no
set-piece grisly shocks in this film, just a growing sense of unease as
Cogitore gently unwinds a chilling tale that convinces us that there
are more things in Heaven and Earth than most filmmakers will have us
believe.
Ni le ciel ni la terre is
beautifully served by its Afghan desert setting (actually the film was
shot in the Atlas mountains of Morocco, not Afghanistan - for fairly
obvious reasons). It's as bleak and desolate a location as you
can imagine, and when seen through a thermal imaging camera (in some of
the spooky night-time sequences) it comes to resemble an alien world,
totally unrecognisable from the one we inhabit (or think we
inhabit). The tough military men - a squad of muscular French
troops led by a virtually recognisable Jérémie Renier -
might as well be ants, so insignificant and vulnerable do they appear
in this forbidding and seemingly endless vista of sand and rock, topped
with a brooding sky that lours with inscrutable menace.
Fear of attack by cut-throat jihadists, fear of injury and even fear of
death itself is something that these soldiers have long grown
accustomed to. But unaccounted for disappearances is something
quite different - it's an attack on our reason, a return to the terror
of childhood where the world is a place of unbounded mystery and
anything is possible. There is nothing more frightening than the
dark, and this is fundamentally what the film is about - man's ability,
or rather inability, to cope with what he does not understand. If
you are so inclined, you might be tempted to interpret the film as an
attack on the neo-con's failure to comprehend the nature of the threat
confronting the West in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks.
When faced with an enemy in the dark, it is a primal instinct that
causes us to lash out with everything we have - and just look where it
has got us.
Typically Gallic in its leaning more towards philosophical
introspection than the usual blockbuster genre chicanery,
Ni le ciel ni la terre is unlikely
to find favour with those expecting a John Carpenter-style romp with
the supernatural. It is a far more subtle and thoughtful film
than this, and even if the plot doesn't have much in the way of
substance, it is hard not to succumb to the poetry of the film's stark
visuals, helped by a disconcerting blend of music that embraces the
ancient and the modern. For a first feature, it is an incredibly
ambitious and daring work, and Clément Cogitore deserves credit
for bringing to 2015 a French film that is both intellectually
stimulating and indefinably weird.
© James Travers 2015
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