Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 48: Tue Feb 18

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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