Tomorrow We Move (Akerman, 2004): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.30pm
This screening is part of the Chantal Akerman season at BFI. The 4K restoration is also screening on March 12th. Full details here.
Review:
Tomorrow We Move (2004) is Chantal Akerman’s most underrated film. There is frequently an element of self-portraiture in
Akerman’s work, but probably never so frankly as in Tomorrow We Move. Sylvie Testud plays Charlotte, a writer finding
it difficult to crank out her commissioned, erotic prose. Chain-smoking,
clumsy, eternally scatty and distracted, Charlotte is a human sponge: whatever
she sees and (especially) hears goes straight into whatever she’s typing. Those
around her burst into laughter at one glimpse of her “comic” attempts at
describing sex. “Comic?”, she keeps asking herself at unexpected intervals. Comedy, sensuality, hard work, mess, cooking, chaos, and
above all the constant presence of music: everything flows, buzzes and
intersects in this portrait of everyday life. It’s a film that the philosopher Spinoza could have
dreamed up, because everything here is a matter of swiftly fluctuating moods,
sensations, inputs that instantly alter people and the way they see and
experience their surroundings. Akerman – much to the chagrin of her co-writer, Eric
de Kuyper – insisted on incorporating even those familial memories of the
Holocaust that haunt much of her œuvre, deepening the prevailing “lightness”
and airiness of the piece. Akerman had, indeed, a lot to “get out of her
system”! The English title gives the film a pun it lacks in the
original French, but fully deserves. “We move”: the reference is to moving
house, relocating oneself; Akerman had already used it once before in the 40
minute monologue-piece, Le Déménagement (Moving In, 1992), which (recalling Michael
Snow’s Wavelength [1967]) slowly
creeps into an extreme close-up of Sami Frey amidst the unpacked boxes of his
life. But there is another type of movement that is
incessant here: the physical movement of walking, rushing, gesturing, dancing.
Like in a musical, everyone is inevitably enchanted (even when they wish not to be), everybody sways to the rhythm – but the
relations between music, dance and action remain loose, mutually autonomous.
Adrian Martin
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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