After Dreaming

It’s hard to do justice to the images in Christine Haroutounian’s After Dreaming through words alone. Their quality is of a blinkered, bleary kind, as if conjured in the seconds after deep sleep. Focal points do not rest on expected subjects, and the vignettes around them construct a scuzzy film. In her conception of Armenia, where the film was made and from whose war-marred history and present it draws its subject matter, Haroutounian has captured a malaise so marrow-deep it alters consciousness.

After Dreaming’s loose narrative coalesces around a road trip taken by an Armenian soldier, Atom (Davit Beybutyan), and the young woman, Claudette (Veronika Poghosyan), whom he is escorting to a relative’s house after her father is murdered. The story, however, is much less important than the abiding atmosphere of oppression blanketing it like a fog. Haroutounian commits to long, sustained silences punctuated only by ambient noise. Her shots, too, composed with cinematographer Evgeny Rodin — who held a separate lens in front of the camera to achieve the signature roving blur — draw out the feeling of real-time beyond our own perception. 

The effect is, understandably, dreamlike. But this isn’t a dream from which one can easily wake. Just like the horse mired in a mucky lake in the film’s opening frame, Claudette and Atom are each trapped: she the family’s youngest daughter, confined to divinity courses and a narrow path to marriage; he the soldier destined only for death. Just after they set off, a police officer pulls them over and prods Atom, suggesting he might be shirking his duties. “After me, the flood,” he jokes, suggestively. Late in the film, when Atom and Claudette’s journey inevitably seems to be taking much longer than it should, they argue over whose life is more meaningless. “Life goes on without you,” Claudette says. 

In between these two points, Atom and Claudette encounter an array of figures strewn across the Armenian countryside, each of them grappling with the effects of war in their own way. An older woman who gives them shelter during a storm proudly calls herself “tater” (grandmother) rather than its diminutive, “taterik.” In any context other than the soul-crushing, genocidal one in which she finds herself, semantics like this might not matter. Perhaps it’s this assertion of a more substantial identity that prompts Atom and Claudette to have sex that night. In the woman’s cave-like basement, its walls almost dripping with lust, the flirtatious parameters of their dynamic engorge. They undress in front of each other without a word. Atom’s hand pushes on the back of Claudette’s head, which hovers inches from the surface of a bucket of water; the threat of submersion seems to entice and repulse her. At night, he rests his head on her lap, she tells him she loves him, and he cries himself to sleep.

Society’s three pillars: the military, marriage, and religion, promise a total immersion — mind, body, and soul — in ritual; it is this broken society’s organizing principle. As harnessed by Haroutounian, however, a group of soldiers’ marching and chanting are as much functions of order as they are impulses. Her camera glides through a squad of soldiers’ parallel formations like a ghost, as their chants of “freedom, independence” lead us into the bowels of a stone monument; like the blue box in Mulholland Drive, it is a portal to a subconscious realm.

Claudette’s religious studies are also a kind of mechanical performance as well as a duty. Her and her classmates’ sonorous rendition of the Lord’s Prayer has a quality of finely tuned perfection, emotionless and somehow engrossing. Haroutounian immerses her camera in the group of young women, no face other than Claudette’s particularly visible; while they gossip about her nearby, the camera’s signature blur expands and contracts across the screen, bending this awkward situation away from the painful realm of reality into something resembling dissociation.

After Dreaming’s most striking sequence comes about an hour in, when Claudette and Atom attend a mass wedding in a small village. After dozens of couples have dutifully signed their papers and taken their government-mandated sums of cash, they gather around a quartet of musicians playing celebratory music. As the sequence stretches beyond 20 minutes, the images’ focus once again becomes erratic, and the once familiar blur distorts objects and figures into abstractions. The sustained intensity of the music gives this ostensible moment of celebration a trance-like quality, facilitated by the music’s pattern of dissonance and resonance, which feels like it will never end. Only Claudette and Atom stand motionless, arms at their sides and faces blank, among the throng of happy couples. Later, military formations are made dizzying by an erratically mobile camera, and church bells and fireworks become indistinguishable from alarms and gunfire. Perhaps Claudette and Atom see something in this pageant, manufactured in the face of so much spiritual degradation, that others don’t. After all, a dream that never ends can only be a nightmare. — CHRIS CASSINGHAM

Selegna Sol

At this point in film history, the city of Los Angeles has been photographed in absurdum. However, the particular neighborhoods in Anouk Moyaux’s Selegna Sol have rarer sightings in the canon. The northeast part of L.A. is a treasure trove of the city’s historical records. Among some of the oldest communities in California, this is where student walkouts across seven high schools ignited the Chicano liberation movement in 1968. And where the infamous Night Stalker killer was hunted down by locals in the vein of Fritz Lang’s M. Moyaux’s film pictures this, the people’s streets, shot exquisitely on 16mm where every frame is a measured endeavor in Hellenistic beauty. 

The film’s sparse narrative follows Gibran, a Mexican immigrant saving up to buy land in his hometown of Tecate. He does odd construction jobs and bemoans the cost of the land he works. He spends time with two friends drinking Modelos and smoking weed in a car overlooking a branded skyline. A cadre of indiscriminate leaning palm trees make silhouettes against the sunset, and the city feels bigger and more interesting than anything the characters have to say. While occasionally funny, the dialogue often comes across as blocky and feels inorganic on top of the formal achievements of the images. Gibran receives his American citizenship in a montage that leverages a hairbrained speech about how betting on America is always a losing hand against footage of Los Angeles that evokes its vastness both physically and historically. The best sequence of the film, it leans into Moyaux’s eye for contradiction without being burdened by the otherwise very omnipresent propensity for didacticism. 

Selegna Sol offers so much sensory aesthetic pleasure that one almost feels distracted, if not pestered, by the occurrence of a narrative. That isn’t to say that every scene with spoken dialogue appears out of place; the vignettes that feel like walking into the middle of a conversation work especially well — for instance, when it’s unclear whether Gibran’s friend Claudia is also a lover. Twice she asks him whether he loves her or his motorcycle more, and both times he answers in a matter-of-fact tone: “Don’t ask that question.” Or there’s the scene where we see Claudia with her three girlfriends at the beach, talking about how the city is so big that you can have long distance friendships even if you both live within its limits. The conversation is followed by a wonderfully rhythmic sequence of the four of them rollerskating, and again Moyaux’s composition verges on the serene. Another especially strong sequence is a montage of a casino with engrossing dissolves of stunning halations. In the same way that Matías Piñeiro seemed to be inventing new ways to see the reflection of light on a body of water with You Burn Me, Moyaux stacks light and movement into an intense vertical investigation of being an immigrant on stolen land, a losing bet if there ever was one. 

By the end of the film, it’s unclear but nonetheless seems improbable that Gibran will ever have enough money to buy land. And yet he is already threatening his friends with symbolic dreams of Tecate calling him home. He’s mourning leaving the city while they reassure him that he won’t miss out on anything but the ever rising cost of living. In Selegna Sol’s final scene, Gibran is alone in his car holding a gold nugget he found after inadvisedly wading into the L.A. River. Whether or not it is real gold, whether or not the manifestation of his American dream would come down to a stroke of unbelievable luck, the last frame feels like a reductive place to end a film that otherwise is so attached to the materiality of its location. But then again, wasn’t it in fact gold that turned that land into a cavity prime for extraction? 

Many manage to do both well enough, but it’s always confounding to encounter a filmmaker with such a clear knack for poetic cinema who finds themselves concerned with any sort of linear relation of events. Just imagine Nathaniel Dorsky’s Before Sunset or Edward Owens’ The Irishman. Selegna Sol settles for being a beautiful film with nothing to say, in that it struggles to find an adequate language for its images — perhaps because the fragmented montage was a round hole to the saccharine hero journey’s square peg. The film’s observations are unsurprising and rendered infinitely more dull by its striking visual language, and this errant sort of vacancy threatens to skew its entire undertaking into the realm of the purely ornamental. Maya Deren’s children are refusing to put the plot down. — ANDIE NGELEKA