InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 21.5

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CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023 HOMECOMING Catherine Corsini Two years ago, French director Catherine Corsini was in Cannes’ Competition with The Divide, a film that used the deteriorating marriage of two well-heeled Parisian women as a frame of reference for considering the “Yellow Vest” protests of 2018. However well-intended Corsini’s cinematic activism may be, The Divide registered as an insufficient response to the French political climate, largely because of her choice of protagonists. It was as if Corsini understood the need to overcome her bourgeois point of view, but simply couldn’t do it. Homecoming is a small step in the right direction, but again Corsini organizes her protagonists’ complex reality through a blinkered upper-class perspective. The fact that Homecoming generally has more on its mind than did The Divide make the new film’s shortcomings that much more regrettable. Corsini once again works with Aissatou Diallo Sagna, the former medical worker whose first acting role was as a beleaguered nurse in The Divide. Here, she plays Kheìdidja, a French-Senegalese woman with two daughters, college-bound Jessica (Suzy Bemba) and 15-year-old troublemaker Farah (Esther Gohourou). In the opening moments of Homecoming, we see a flashback to Kheìdidja preparing to leave Corsica with hekids when she receives a phone call with tragic news. Her Corsican husband has just died in a car accident. In the present day, she and the kids are traveling back to Corsica for the first time since their departure, and Jessica and Farah hope to learn more about their late father. But this desire is complicated by a series of family secrets that Kheìdidja has never managed to address. Although Homecoming is shot in a rather uninflected realist mode, one immediately notices that once in Corsica, Kheìdidja and her girls are literally hard to see. The underlit cinematography allows them to almost disappear into the scenery. There has been a fairly extensive discourse regarding the chemistry and light sensitivity of Western image-making technologies, suggesting an ideological bias towards the accurate rendering of white skin. But one gets the sense that Corsini is intentionally cloaking her protagonists in twilight to suggest their marginality. Homecoming is steeped in conflicting signals regarding race, class, and ethnicity. But there’s an underlying conservatism at work. Perhaps without meaning to, Corsini suggests that despite these characters’ intersectional 7
FESTIVAL COVERAGE identities, and the changing face of Europe more broadly, they can never truly belong to larger society. As Kheìdidja explains, she never felt she belonged to her husband’s world, and this was exacerbated when her mother-in-law (Marie-Ange Geronimi) blames her for her son’s death. This inability to thrive in the white world is repeated when the family returns to Corsica. Jessica starts a relationship with Gaia (Lomane de Dietrich), the daughter of Kheìdidja’s wealthy employers, while Farah is antagonized, then befriended, by a casually racist local boy (Jean Michelangelini). Corsini creates a scenario wherein Kheìdidja, Jessica, and Farah are able to begin new phases in their lives, but in the end they all return to the family they know, the three of them against the world. Their flirtation with European whiteness is tragic, nearly deadly. Corsini seems to be attempting to examine the personal fallout from various historical forms of oppression: racism, colorism, classicism, and homophobia. However, simply touching on these issues is not the same as producing an analysis. Homecoming ends by curtailing cultural hybridity in favor of self-separation, as if her characters’ desires for something larger are little more than expressions of internalized colonial consciousness. In true bourgeois fashion, Corsini depicts a multiculturalism defined by tolerance and coexistence, which sounds fine until you realize what that actually entails. We only encounter one another in passing, and no one ever has to learn, grow, or change. — MICHAEL SICINSKI ABOUT DRY GRASSES Nuri Bilge Ceylan When first introduced in About Dry Grasses, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest feature, Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu), an art teacher, has been in the remote village of Icesu for four years. Posted there for compulsory civil service, he has been looking to leave since the moment he arrived — and by the end of the film, he will do so. Before the school year is out, though, he will first be involved in two overlapping dramas which constitute the bulk of the film’s 197-minute runtime. In the first, Samet and his colleague-cum-roommate Kenan (Musab Ekı̇cı̇) are accused of inappropriate conduct by two eighth-grade students, and come close to losing their jobs. The situation is all the more surprising to Samet when he finds out that one of the accusers is his pet student Sevim (Ece Bağci), whose innocent crush on him evidently sours when she catches him reading a love letter she wrote, which was confiscated by another teacher. In the second, Samet and Kenan get involved in a love triangle with Nuray (Merve Dı̇zdar), a disabled fellow educator from a different school, who lost her leg during a recent bombing. Like Ceylan’s 2014 Palme d’Or-winning Winter Sleep, About Dry Grasses works primarily as a character study of an arrogant man desperately lacking in self-awareness, developed across lengthy, combative conversation scenes. The difference in About Dry Grasses is how these conversations unfold in relation to Sevim and Nuray, respectively. Sevim, who goes unseen for a long stretch following the initial accusation, becomes a kind of structuring absence, a void onto which Samet can project not just his anger at the situation, but also his more general dissatisfaction with his lot in life. Nuray, for her part, is able to directly confront Samet in conversation. The film’s centerpiece scene — possibly the longest in the film — comprises an intellectual face-off between the two, in which she challenges his somewhat cynical worldview with her own. This difference in treatment is reflected, too, in the dramatic structure. Samet’s unusually friendly relationship with Sevim is there from the film’s start — and though we see nothing more inappropriate than his giving her a compact mirror, we are not privy to how their relationship began and evolved. His interactions with Nuray, by contrast, are contained entirely within the film’s timeline, and we see his duplicity in dealing with both her and Kenan. While Ceylan may never make a film under three hours again, About Dry Grasses showcases his dramatic flair and control of pacing even better than Winter Sleep. What remains difficult to account for is the film’s shape and structure, particularly during the longest tête-à-têtes. Ceylan’s knack for dialogue and his consistent ability to elicit convincing performances from his actors is not to be undervalued. Indeed, watching About Dry Grasses, it occurred to me that Ceylan’s approach to revealing his characters’ histories, in uncovering the layers of their behavioral personalities, might be compared to that of Mike Leigh, except with logy dialogue and speech patterns instead of action. The comparison, though, only drives home how much more judicious Leigh’s use of structure is — this despite the usual critical focus 8
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InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 21.5

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