InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 21.5

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CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023 on his reliance on improvisation. Following the centerpiece conversation between Samet and Nuray, they make to go to bed together, but before they do so we watch as Celiloğlu opens a door of Nuray’s apartment, the camera following him into the soundstage where the film is being shot. In a different film, this rupture would reverberate both forwards and backwards into the runtime, recontextualizing what we’ve seen, and shifting how we take what we will subsequently see. Here, though, things simply resume as before, as if no such break took place. Like most every scene in About Dry Grasses, the sequence is compelling, even thrilling in isolation. It’s the bigger picture that disappoints. — LAWRENCE GARCIA IT’S RAINING IN THE HOUSE Paloma Sermon-Daï’ Belgian director Paloma Sermon-Daï’s 2020 documentary film Petit Samedi profiled her own family, paying particular attention to her brother and his drug addiction. Her debut narrative feature, It’s Raining in the House, shifts focus, instead considering the way that children are forced to cope with a mother (Louise Manteau) who’s absent and unreliable for reasons that are never clearly articulated. Seventeen-year-old Purdey (Purdey Bloquiau) and her 15-year-old brother Mak (Makenzy Lombet) have typical sibling conflicts, such as Mak not keeping the house tidy or Purdey not answering Mak’s calls. But there is a firm bond between them, because essentially, they’re all each other has. Whether speaking with a real estate agent or a prospective employer, Purdey must continually emphasize that she will be eighteen “in just a few days,” because it’s up to her to see her family through until their mother deigns to return from wherever she may be. Purdey, and to a lesser extent Mak, being thrown headlong into an uncertain adulthood is the primary theme of It’s Raining in the House, which takes its title from a broken skylight above Purdey’s room, an otherwise major problem (in most lives) here depicted as just another lingering crisis. To its credit, the film mostly deemphasizes the various troubles the kids face, since they are fairly ordinary for this poor family, even in the best of times. In fact, Sermon-Daï gives greater significance to the interpersonal and psychological problems the siblings are grappling with even as they struggle to survive. Purdey must take a job as a hotel cleaner, putting her ambitions on hold. She wants to study nursing, and her judgmental, upper-middle-class “boyfriend” (Amine Hamidou) — who already keeps their relationship a secret — tells her she will amount to nothing and is not good enough for him. Mak, meanwhile, has just failed out 9
FESTIVAL COVERAGE of school, and spends the summer fencing stolen bikes with his slightly better-off friend Dono (Donovan Nizet). Although Sermon-Daï never spells it out, Mak’s anger issues may owe as much to anxiety about his sexual identity as they do to his mother’s indifference. Although It’s Raining in the House appears, stylistically, indebted to the Dardennes, Sermon-Daï’s approach is very different. Where the Belgian brothers’ narratives tend to be rather propulsive, It’s Raining in the House is languid, at times even a bit inert. The essentials of its story will call to mind other, better films, such as Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Nobody Knows or, perhaps more closely, Ursula Meier’s Sister. But where those films seemed intent on dramatizing their young characters’ plights as signs of egregious neglect, Sermon-Daï merely observes, as if to suggest that there’s nothing that surprising about kids left to fend for themselves. And sadly, that may be true. — MICHAEL SICINSKI A SONG SUNG BLUE Geng Zihan A delicate and bittersweet queer coming-of-age film, A Song Sung Blue is also, unfortunately, weighed down by all the predictable beats that befall its bildungsroman genre. Set in the early 2010s in Harbin, China, Geng Zihan’s debut feature follows fifteen-year-old Liu Xian (Zhou Meijun), who’s sent off to live with her estranged father after her mother takes a job in Africa. Xian is a child whose presence is a mere afterthought to her parents; in turn, she shrinks down within every space she occupies, reducing herself to silently watching the world from behind window sills as it moves on without her. Xian’s father is a photographer, and his studio is where Xian is forced to spend most of her time. It’s at the studio that Xian meets Mingmei (Huang Ziqi), the bold and assertive 18-year-old daughter of the receptionist with whom Xian’s father is having an affair. The photography studio offers an appropriate setting to highlight Xian’s growing (and largely unrequited) infatuation with Mingmei. Upon arriving at the studio, we’re introduced to Xian — who barely spares a glance for her father — gazing longingly at professional portraits of women. In these photographs, the women appear cheerful; they’re donned in garish colors that outshine Xian’s drab uniform (and stand out against this film’s predominantly melancholic blue palette). Yet every photograph also suggests the alluring pretense of appearances: Xian longs to be recognized by her parents, and this desire leads her to fall for a woman whose interest in Xian is as dead as the frozen frames plastered all over the studio. Not surprisingly, Mingmei also poses for portraits from time to time, thus bringing the cruel filmic metaphor of a lonely and unrequited love to fruition. While cinematographer Hao Jiayue creates a hazy and dreamlike atmosphere through which to explore Xian and Mingmei’s encounters, perfectly accentuating the fantastical and all-consuming nature of Xian’s one-sided obsession with the older Mingmei, at times Geng’s film seems to rely too heavily on style to buoy a stagnant narrative of desire. The wistfulness pervading every frame mirrors Xian’s passivity and self-defined 10
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InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 21.5

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