ADAM BESSA AND JULIA FRANZ RICHTER

JONATHAN MILLET: GHOST TRAIL/ LES FANTÔMES (2024) - Rendez-Vous with French Cinema

TRAILER (FRENCH)

This is distinctive and single-minded sorytelling that holds you intensely and convincingly from the first frame to the last. We see a group of men dumped off in the desert from a Syrian prison. Then we follow one of them, who we'll call Hamid - he goes by various names (French-born, Tunisian-descent actor Adam Bessa), as, working in construction in France two yers later, he approaches many Syrians with a blurry photo of someone eventually identified as "Sami Hanna" who he is looking for. Eventually he himself finds someone he thinks is this man, who is called Harfaz (Tawfeek Barhoum of Cairo Conspiracy and The Boy from Heaven), whom he believes tortured him in the prison week after week for a year. Hamid is, now anyway, a part of a tight group tracking down criminals from the Syrian regime and he follows their irules, waiting for instructions and meeting regularly with a woman whom he eventually learns is Nina (Julia Franz Richter). He also sees a Syrian woman called Yara (Hala Rajab). Meethings with the group are done online with the cover of a combat video game. He talks regularly to his mother (Shafiqa El Till) in the Beirut Baqa'a Refugee Camp to whom he lies and says he is in Berlin (where most of the refugees are, so it's plausible). The filmmkers plausibly recreate Beirut later, using Amman.

Yara wants Hamid to give up his pursuit, try to forget, and go back to his occupation, when his wife and daughter were alive: lecturing on Arabic literature. He says, "look at me. Do I look like someone who could teach poetic stucture?" This is how well Jonathan Millet can rely on Bessa's face: how effectively it evokes the impossibility of poetry after torture.

Is this the man Hamid thinks he is? We don't know and are on tenderhooks to find out, especially since Hamid gets so close to him he can smell him, in fact scents him like an animal. He says he recognizes his "riha," his scent. There are other suspects named as being this man in other countries. Hamid never saw his torturer. He had a bag over his head when he was tortured. But he is sure he can recognize him and sticks intently to this belief. Is he crazy and doomed? Will he commit violence and wind up in a European prison or dead? We don't know. But the intimacy of the filmmaking, close to that "riha," keeps us from doubting or distancing ourselves from this man who pursues his man almost with a religious fervor.

The film is simple and straightforward and intimate, but moves voices, faces, and places around with its own rhythms. We hear things that have been said to Hamid while looking at him, silent: a simple way of getting us closer to him, as close as he gets to the man he is foolowing. There's a great, sparing use of ominous sound design and score, and a good use of a silence into which the voices come.

These two men, both actors in their early thirties, look younger, and rather frail. The dominent image is the face of actor Adam Bessa, a riveting actor with a look at once weary, haunted, and fiercely determined. The man who may be Harfaz has a lighter air. The effect of putting them close together (eventually they speak) is a litle like Humbert Humbert and Clare Quilty in Kubrick's Lolita, an air of mockery wedded to an air of danger, freedom or death both potentially around the corner in an instant. It's a riveting effect.

Jon Frosch in The Hollywood Reporter calls this film "a tense, terrifically acted thriller" but it also feels like something almost as obsessive as Robert Bresson's films, except that it has elements of both the spy novel and the political thriller. For those reasons it reminded me of Christian Petzold's Transit - there is the same sense of the complexity of world politics being alive in the moment, of one's identity and one's most intmate relations and fate trapped in a web of contemporary history. One never feels the filmmakers are intent on making a point so much as showing us how this could be for those who have lived it. Jonathan Millet's film is as good as Christian Petzold's, and that is very good.

And the horror of torture is evoked. This comes when Hamid listens to recordings of testimonies transmitted to him from the group he is in, while he is mentally comparing them with his own experience. We can't say what happens next but when it does, it's astonishing, with the revelation about "Harfaz," the man Hamid is following, retaining a teasing mystery, for me at least, even to the last.

I'm often a sucker for scoreless films and this is a little bit that, which contributes to the authenticity ahd focus. A terrific film.

Ghost Trail/Les Fantômes, 94 mins., debuted at Cannes Critics' Week May 15, 2024, showing also Warsaw, BFI London, São Paulo, Chicago, El Gouna, Stockholm, Palm Springs, Rotterdam, IFFR in Groningen, Warsaw, BFI London. Relesed in France Jul. 3, 2024. AlloCiné ratings 4.0 (80%) press, 3.8 (76%) spectators.High score. Distributedin the US by Music Box Films, it opens in New York on Friday, May 30 at Film at Lincoln Center, expanding thereafter. Screened for this review as part of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center, NYC. Showing:
Sunday, March 9 at 3:15pm – Q&A with Jonathan Millet
Tuesday, March 11 at 9:00pm

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