Since its seemingly incongruous premiere in the Berlin Film Festival’s Panorama section earlier this year, many (including myself) have thought of Sebastian Brameshuber’s London as existing in a similar vein as David Easteal’s The Plains (2022), which increasingly seems to be one of the signal films of the decade: a three-hour odyssey mostly composed of car rides featuring a man driving home from work. At first, London, which played in Currents, appears to be exactly that: the first shot is from just behind the front windshield of a car, before two profile shots show the passenger, a young soldier, and the driver, an late-middle-aged man named Bobby (Bobby Sommer, the non-professional star of Jem Cohen’s Museum Hours fourteen years ago). But after fifteen minutes, the title card appears, Bobby is seen washing his face by a water pump, and when he is next seen behind the wheel, the other voice is unmistakably female, confirmed by a reverse shot a number of minutes later.
London is not after the kind of exploration of space and time that The Plains undertook, or even the meditations of Kiarostami’s numerous car films, but instead something almost classical: a character study as refracted through the ten passengers, all played by non-actors, that he ferries between Vienna and Salzburg, where he visits a friend with increasing regularity. The reason for this is divulged early, providing a narrative backbone that is reiterated with fascinating little changes over each new encounter, and yet Brameshuber is equally interested in the (mostly metaphorical, occasionally literal) detours that the passengers lead Bobby down, breaking up the three-hour Autobahn trek with discourse about the unintentional Marxist masterpiece Avatar, the anxieties over a first-time job, the experience of migrant Romanians, and, in one of the film’s most pointed moments, a scholar—played by translator and filmmaker Ted Fendt—who requests an additional stop at a soon-to-be demolished bridge dating, like the highway itself, to the Nazi era.
One piece of information I was only vaguely aware of before going in, but which seems increasingly crucial to London‘s potency: with very few exceptions, the film was almost entirely shot in a studio in front of a screen, with enough footage of Sommer on location outside his vehicle to sell the illusion. Its use is not dissimilar to Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s penchant for rear projection, who once said at another NYFF “when I hold the inside of a moving vehicle, the space that characters are occupying is a particular space in which, often, unspoken truths are revealed and the relationship between characters is actually transformed. So, in fact, to the characters inside that space, the scenes outside of them are close to irrelevant, and what’s more important is this particular, unique space, this dramatic space—and that’s what I’m emphasizing.” Brameshuber’s method is more seamless, but the effect is similar, compounded by the continual reconfiguration of Bobby’s relationship to his passengers. London reaches a natural terminus, yet keeps going, finding an appropriate state of suspension that hearkens back to a more unexpected car movie from the past five years, achieving a state of grace within a hard-found unknown territory.
Another film that used non-actors in expressive ways came in the only Revivals film I was able to see at the festival: Allen Fong’s Just Like Weather (1986). One of the most underheralded members of the Hong Kong New Wave, his follow-up to his classics Father and Son (1981) and Ah Ying (1983) was this curio, an openly metafictional portrait of a married couple that seems to have arrived years ahead of its time in its sophisticated, willfully confounding blurring of both reality and cause and effect. Hung and Christine live in Hong Kong with a very cute dog, facing continual yet rarely rancorous struggle over his inconsistent employment, whether to have a child, and whether to move to America. Parallel to this more overtly fictional narrative—albeit based upon their own experiences—is a seemingly documentary thread that shows Fong and his crew interacting with the couple as they eventually go to America, embarking on a road-trip from San Francisco to New York where they plan to stay for an indefinite period with a relative at a Chinese restaurant. Along the way, Fong occasionally interviews the two separately and together about sexuality and relationships, in a manner not dissimilar from what Stanley Kwan would perfect in Center Stage five years later.
Just Like Heaven only gets most fascinating as it goes along, largely because it takes a great deal of time to fully grasp its near-achronological presentation. One of its early scenes, a certainly staged yet intimate conversation between the two, is only definitely shown to take place in the “documentary” section and far into the film; a brief break in relationship during the “narrative” thread is juxtaposed with the couple together in America. There is even a Hong Kong news broadcast in that mentions a snowstorm that stranded many people, something that will only come to pass more than half an hour later as the couple and Fong’s crew experience it themselves. The cumulative effect of all these disjunctions is elusive, and yet the final parting, with director separating himself from these two people embarking on an unknown future, refuses to distinguish itself from “fact” or “fiction”; perhaps the emotion embodied onscreen by these wily, mercurial people is all that truly matters.
