TIFF17: Plonger
Plonger is directed by Mélanie Laurent, who you hopefully know as an actress (I mean, if you don’t know her as the Jewish milkmaid Shosanna from Inglorious Basterds, I don’t even know). If the kind of stylish tortured love story that you might associate with, well a French actress, doesn’t pique your interest, don’t worry, Laurent’s might still have something for you: her next film is called Galveston, stars Ben Foster and Elle Fanning, and was written by Nic Pizzolatto (yeah, that one), and contains scenes of torture, so . . .
But enough about torture, let’s talk Plonger, which is certainly not torture, though it is not without some gut wrenching moments. Those moments are a long time coming. We are first brought inside the intimate whirlwind beginnings of the love affair between César, a 40 year old cultural journalist, and Paz, a younger Spanish photographer. Laurent uses her camera and her editing effectively, condensing and rearranging the events of this love story, visiting and re-visiting their lovemaking, conversations, and frequently drawing back to appreciate the spectacular Spanish landscapes where they fall in love. The prologue is expressive and suggestive rather than literal (the emotional equivalent of Le fort des fous’ dedication to showing and not telling, but less alienating), which makes it feel immediate and intimacy ultimately quite truthful.
It also sets the tone for the shape of their lives together: the romance is all motion and light and spontaneity, which is hard to keep up in domestic situations. Paz’ artistic struggles are not all-consuming at first, but once César and Paz move to Paris, she begins to feel the constraints of convention, domesticity, and expectations. Laurent is excellent at conveying how claustrophobic this feels for Paz, by circling around their lives in the cramped apartment, all tight spaces and shadows in perpetual Parisian gloom (no sign of the glorious Paris in springtime of Le Fableux Destin d’Amélie Poulain, for example). Paz wants her freedom, wants her inspiration and she wants to go to the Gulf of Aden. Her artistic imagination is consumed with liminal spaces like beaches, where water meets land, which we learn in the prologue, so this isn’t completely out of nowhere. Still traveling to Yemen, a country in civil war, between Shia proxies for Iran, jihadists, and Wahhabists, none of whom have any time or good intentions for a white European woman traveling alone, which César tells her in no uncertain terms. Sadly, he forbids her to go, which is like, Gallic and all, but out of keeping her his normally much more hands off approach to Paz and her artistic life.
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Feeling thwarted and trapped and increasingly dead artistically, Paz steals away from a gala opening featuring some of her work and connects with a roving band of guerilla street artists who create sound and light exhibits of that attempt to convey the placid world beneath the ocean and how aggressive and disruptive their contact with humanity is. This sequence, as the woman she followed out of the gala introduces her to the installation (“We’re not supposed to be here”) and then to the group of artists and hangers on, is a tour de force, an intensely emotional experience that activates something deep inside Paz, we can see that resonance inside of her throughout the scene, it grows and grows, the amplitude increasing in intensity, until a we see Paz’s enraptured face, lit blue by the light shining through the water, lost in the quiet thrill of the radical silence of the world beneath the waves as compared to the mechanical clatter that those of us in cities are constantly surrounded by.
Beyond, Laurent’s direction, the reason I wanted to see this was that once upon a time I got certified as a diver (and then immediately had an accident that totaled my goal. I love water and I love being underwater (I hate the beach though, so that’s . . . a challenge) and when Paz experienced that sound for the first time, well, I completely got it and what she wanted.
After Paz’s ecstatic experience with these artists, she gets obsessed with the ocean and with sharks in particular (the microphones she had heard were often located on or near sharks), so much so that she adopts one that swims in the Indian Ocean (if you know your geography — the Gulf of Aden is the gateway to the Indian Ocean from the Red Sea). The sound of this beacon becomes the only source of comfort for her, and it is almost constant throughout this section of the film, where the bonds of domesticity tighten even further on Paz as she discovers that she is pregnant.
This film has a very interesting set of gender dynamics (shouldn’t be a surprise with a woman director who encourages improvisation). César is an older Frenchman, so he’s not immune to immense cultural weight of expectations and gender roles that comes with that. But he is a journalist who covers culture, so he absolutely appreciates Paz’s need for creativity and inspiration; his exasperation with her is not that she needs her space, but that she can’t seem to find it and he doesn’t know how to help. On a scale of 1 (Neanderthal) to 10 (perfect feminist ally partner), César registers like a 7-. And even when the kid arrives, we see the stress on both parents. This section is primarily told from Paz’s perspective, so Cesar slips to like a 6, but it’s clear that he has not abandoned her to his day job or anything. The struggle is real and the messiness feels as authentic as the love story, but it’s a massive shift away from stereotypes and dull, cheap melodrama, territory that the world has plenty of at this point.
The last part of the film deserves to a lot of time spent with it. Our view of Paz gets much more complicated when her inner struggles become so much for her that she feels that she has to leave César and their baby (which doesn’t have a name at that point). Our perspective shifts to César as a single parent, which is also pretty interesting, but there is a long way for the story to go from when Paz leaves. It kills me that I can’t talk about this part (it’s where all of the real diving takes place!) because there is an amazingly beautiful ending that is deliberately ambiguous in its symbolic meaning (and maybe it doesn’t need to be a symbol at all, hold that thought). Plonger is going to get a release, albeit an arthouse style limited one, so we should talk after you see it, if you’re going to see it. It would be deeply unfair for me to spend any more time talking about the events and the rich emotional journey of the film. Suffice it to say, Plonger more than lived up to the expectations I had for it. It’s stylish and beautiful and emotional and so true to the anxieties and the highs and lows of the creative life, and just a wonderful film.
