Here (Bas Devos, 2023) (Patreon)

I knew next to nothing about Here when I watched it, aside from the fact that it's Belgian, and that it's one of the year's most acclaimed films. Reading about it afterwards, and seeing the way people have interpreted the film, I'm utterly at a loss. This is a mildly diverting observational film that is so recessive in its stylistic approach that it barely leaves a footprint. Devos suggests certain themes or emotions -- homesickness, dislocation, mortality -- but always managed to sidestep any actual assertion about these ideas. It's going for gossamer, but to me it dissipates more like a vapor.

Apparently I was supposed to observe a possible romance, and be impressed that Devos avoided following the roadmap of genre, to say nothing of compulsory heterosexuality. We meet our protagonist (Stefan Gota), a Romanian living in Brussels. He works construction, and there's a one-month break on the job, so he's preparing to go back home for awhile, maybe permanently. He has insomnia, so he takes long walks through the city at night. And, preparing for his absence, he clears the vegetables out of his fridge and makes a pot of soup.

One rainy evening, Stefan meets Shuxiu (Liyo Gong), a bryologist (someone who studies moss), because she stays with her aunt who runs the Chinese restaurant he ducks into. They have a pleasant chat. A few days later, he's wandering through a forest and encounters Shuxiu again, this time in the middle of collecting moss samples. They recognize each other, and he sort of tags along on her expedition, asking questions and looking at the moss through her magnifying glass. They part ways, and aside from Stefan dropping off some of the soup (more on that in a second), that's the extent of their interaction.

Here struck me as rather lightweight, a bit too enchanted with its observations regarding the little things all around us. Shuxiu actually tells Stefan that moss "is everywhere, but we never notice it." Earlier, she recounts a dream in which she temporarily forgot the names of things. These ideas, along with Devos' frequent inserts of microscope views of moss and blades of grass, made me think that Here was a clumsy attempt at making a narrative film from the aesthetic philosophy of Stan Brakhage. Don't name things, don't get bogged down in concepts, just experience the sensual world around you.

And yet, this seems to be what Here is having trouble doing. I will never blame a film for the wrongheaded ideas it inspires in its viewers, but the fact that virtually every review or synopsis I've read of Here alludes to some fleeting, unrequited romance between Shuxiu and Stefan only goes to show how impossible it is to bring Brakhage's phenomenology into the realm of narrative. You've got two young people who "meet cute" twice, and so clearly they form a prospective couple? It's as though Here actively coaxes its viewer to disregard the "be here now" philosophizing it's pushing by activating our kneejerk associations of boy-meets-girl.

Although again, I did not pick up on this alleged subtext. This is partly because, as we follow Stefan, he has numerous other encounters with people he knows to varying extents. Stefan helps a friend Cédric Luvuezo) set places at the restaurant where he works. He goes to see his mechanic (Teodor Corban), a slightly older man who he seems to know as an old family friend. And he has a chat with his older sister (Saadia Bentaïeb), a night nurse, letting her know he may not be coming back to Belgium at the end of his holiday.

While it's true that Shuxiu is the only person Stefan is meeting for the first time, and the only one he sees twice, there are actually more common elements across these encounters. He has low-key conversations with all of them, showing a calm, easy manner that makes him likable, but also depicts him as a bit of a cipher. Most significantly, Stefan brings soup to everyone he meets, and the conversations all take place while they eat the soup. The sharing of food is a catalyst for social relations, making Here a kind of art-house rendition of the "stone soup" parable. And it's lovely as far as it goes.

I suppose if Devos had really focused on the role of food in bringing people together, that would be exactly the kind of conceptual thinking Here purports to refute. But it might have been a better choice than the one he actually made. Everything in Here's formal rhetoric, from its gently gliding camera to its discontinuous, almost oneiric narrative drift, tells us that this is a film that prefers to observe than to parse meaning. But in small but unavoidable ways, Here emphasizes the relationship between Stefan and Shuxiu as something unusual, and this makes it too easy for the viewer to read it as potential coupling. And then, presumably, we're to congratulate Devos for what he didn't do. That film, about the unexpected and undefined interaction that doesn't last but lingers in the mind, has already been made by Jem Cohen, and it was called Museum Hours.