FIDMarseille 2024: bluish (Grand Prize Winner) | Review
Lilith Kraxner and Milena Czernovsky’s sublime pursuit of connection and longing within the ordinary. bluish won the Grand Prize at FIDMarseille 2024.
In capturing the mundane through cinema, narrative becomes the background while the details of gestures and locations become the foreground. Working around this mode of filmmaking, directors Lilith Kraxner and Milena Czernovsky capture the essence of harboring inner thoughts and feelings, using time and space as the landscape to process emotions through duration.
In their debut feature, Beatrix (2021), the two’s austere sensibilities are intended for evocation disguised as simplicity. Formally demanding in its use of duration and static framing, the directors’ attention to space and structure allows its characters to deconstruct (and paradoxically, expand) from within based on their surroundings. In Beatrix, it keeps its plot as simple and low-stakes as possible; a woman in a house in the woods goes about her day doing routine activities with guests coming in and out, becoming a character study of a millennial woman based on her movements and physicality, propelled through its visual language.
In bluish, their latest film premiering in the international competition at this year’s FIDMarseille, the directors expand on their formal capabilities through two young women, juxtaposing (or paralleling) their placement and longing in the world at a very specific moment in their lives. Opening in a rapturous musical number, backdropped in deep black, three women majestically sing as the 16mm grain and colors pop through the screen. Immediately hard cutting to the twilight hours show a blueish color palette that will modulate throughout the film, entering a world of contemplation.
We meet Errol and Sasha, two students at an Austrian university, specializing in the arts. Errol, an Austrian who can’t seem to connect with the world because of her timidity and gentle glares. And Sasha, a more extroverted (on the surface) migrant Russian, always seems to be searching, albeit with a more adventurous approach. Taking over almost a day, its ellipses cut back and forth between the two paths, stitching its rigorous structure of events, prolonging time in relation to introspection. The linkage between the two becomes more and more apparent through the patience of the action and editing. In one scene, Errol is cleaning a houseplant in a meditative manner, and in the very next scene, Sasha brings home a similar plant for her unfurnished apartment, implying a fresh start. They never meet, but one can deduce the universal feeling between the two and its possible connections. These types of visual storytelling inhabit the film to obliquely provide character details in unusual but rewarding ways.
As the story advances, less plot seems to matter. Errol goes to Zoom-calls during class, does odd jobs such as coat-check service, and swims at the local community pool. Her ponderous stares show a woman who is longing for human connection. Sasha goes thrift-shopping for furniture and couches, sometimes with her partner (who’s barely there [an important detail in her drive for yearning]), and goes to local art shows and parties to introduce, network, or connect. And at the end of the day, a thematic and atmospheric sequence guides Sasha (and us) into the dark via technology, and if you’re willing to go with the flow, the meditative wander into slumber becomes sublime.
The film’s fragmented moments are waiting for something to eventually burst, and in some ways it does, just not in the traditional sense. Kraxner and Czernovsky are on their own wavelength, admiring how the subtleties of life make lasting impressions through attentive and matter-of-fact gestures.
bluish, whose world sales are handled by Square Eyes, was awarded by the international competition jury of the 35th FIDMarseille, the 2024 Grand Prize.
