Where to
On the garden wall, one big drum and two shinny tubas. A quarter or so away, two kids (headphones on their heads but not on their ears, hands holding soda cans) quietly talking; their positions, their calmness, make one think of philosophers out of some old painting. A bit farther, a small truck where someone has graffiti-painted a big red circle and the name “Henry” — at any given moment, a plainclothes Shakespearian king may come out of the vehicle and deliver a poetic, inspiring speech. And, when I get to Mercado da Ribeira, that man and that woman. They’re just working and, still, they look like a parable. It could be called “The beginning of time”. Seen through the out-of-focus glass window, they look like they are made of nothing but cinema.
I go for a walk and Lisbon feels like a Hal Hartley’s film. I don’t think he has ever filmed here, so it must be something with my eyes. His cinema is in my eyes, I guess. I’ve watched Hartley’s new movie, Where to land, in a festival recently, and it’s great. It has the same spirit, the same verve (if that’s the right word: pardon my English) his old films had. And it has something more. A little melancholic irony, a little restraint, a little distance from the comings and goings of the plot — as if Hartley had decided to direct this one with Time standing by his side, with a metaphoric hand on his human shoulder.
A not-that-famous-but-quite-renowned film director, who hasn’t made a movie for some years, wants to work at a graveyard, and that generates a series of misunderstandings and discussions on death, getting old, the end of the world — it’s a comedy, of course. In the usual Hartley’s tone, that somehow manages to put together distance and illusion, electric guitars and philosophy, high and low culture.
After the screening at this festival, Leffest, there was a talk with Hal Hartley himself. I asked him about the work with the actors. The American master answered that the most important thing was language. Getting the words right.
How counterintuitive and how true, right? Words can make everything so much clear. But only those words, the right, necessary, exact words. Words you can put on, like glasses, to actually see things.
Where to land, by Hal Hartley: don’t miss it. The man is back. No, seriously: it feels really good to know that, in this time of greedy entertainment and pointless images, a cinematic body of work like his — where ideas are staged, captured in space, where word and action create a unique, clear mystery — is still pushing forward.