BAS DEVOS: VIOLET (2014)



Belgian bike boy suffering vivid loss

In Bas Devos' mute, artful feature, Jesse (Cesar De Sutter) is a blond Belgian teenager who is forced to watch his pal Jonas knifed to death in a mall (an event the viewer also sees helplessly, playing off on CCTV surveillance monitors); and he spends the rest of the film trying to process this loss. A lot of things happen (and it has a vérité feel that can't be entirely faked). Not much is said. The sometimes avant-garde-feeling cinematography speaks volumes, to our aesthetic sense, at least.

Clearly, the material in Devos' Violet closely matches Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park, though Jesse is less overtly guilty, just appeals complicit to his friends, who don't understand why he was there but couldn't stop Jonas from getting killed, or why Jonas got killed and he didn't. The slim, inarticulate boys are much the same, with BMX bikes and a forested bike playground reached by car replacing the questionable "Paranoid Park" of Van Sant's skateboarders. I am obliged to Boyd van Hoeij, reviewing Violet at the Berlinale for [url="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/violet-berlin-review-680577"]Hollywood Reporter[/url], for the reminder that Paranoid Park was shot by Wong Kar Wai's eccentric and brilliant cinematographer Christopher Doyle. This film turns out to have been done, in 65mm. and with the digital Alexa by Nicolas Karakatsanis, perhaps an equal ace behind the camera and who has recently also been the dp for not only Bullhead, the extraordinarily talented Matthias Schoenaerts' breakthrough film directed by Michaël R. Roskam, but for Roskam's The Drop (with Schoenaerts as well as Gandolfini) and The Loft, another Belgian-directed film with Schoenaerts and American actors. But all these are guaranteed to be more accessible than the mute and withholding Violet, which challenges its viewers to stay tuned and put things together into a coherent tale. Van Sant did however do much the same thing in Paranoid Park, if more accessibly.

One could go on at length about the special beauties of Karakatsanis' images. As van Hoeij puts it, the 65mm images, which provide a wealth of shallow focus in closeup portraits -- lingering long on De Sutter's head from above, for instance, right after the crime, as he stares down for a long silent stretch waiting for his mother to comfort him and clean the blood off him -- everything but the long blond swath of hair a beautiful blur. Images contrasty like this seem to sing but also, more to the point here, can seem to shriek at us. Or there is Jesse's family's house seen from a distance in the twilight, with colors quietly intense and everything in the rooms clearly visible, though small. Meanwhile the academy ratio images feel intimate but confined, like the uptight sensibility of the inarticulate boys, who seem to re-bond with Jesse only by riding bikes beside and around him; and the confinement of his (again inarticulate) grief. It's not clear every viewer will grasp any of this; for anybody it may take some effort, and for those out of tune it will seem just willful artiness. But we'd like to see more collaborations between Devos and Karakatsanis. Their use of actors and milieux as well as images is pro.

But this film risks seeming little more than an arty remake. Mike D'Angelo saw it as part of ND/NF too, and has tweeted: "Gave up on a moody ND/NF film, shot in 1.33, about a teen dirt biker who witnesses a death. Aren’t filmmakers aware of other major films?" and "What I saw was almost exactly PARANOID PARK, except with fewer dialogue scenes and even more shots of kids flying through the air."

Violet, 82 mins., debuted at the Berlinale February 2014; over a dozen other festival showings since then, including Edinburgh, Karlovy, Sarajevo and Toronto. Screened for this review as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center-Museum of Modern Art series, New Directors/New Films of March 2015.


Cesar De Sutter in Violet

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.