Cinéma du réel 2021: Venice Beach, CA. (Marion Naccache) | Review
With a light deftness and enchanting poetry, director Marion Naccache gives a voice to the voiceless and reveals the soul of Venice Beach, in a beautifully crafted documentary.
The 43rd Cinéma du réel, Paris International Documentary Film Festival, wrapped up a successful online edition a few weeks ago. The festival offered us the opportunity to discover and highlight a number of gems, such as Marc Isaacs’ The Filmmaker’s House, Shengze Zhu’s A River Runs, Turns, Erases, Replaces, or a couple of powerful short films.
Another title from this year’s lineup turned out to be a profoundly poetic documentary: Venice Beach, CA is an immersive, delicate and heartfelt look at a place like no other in California and in the United States.
Directed by French filmmaker Marion Naccache – known for Coney Island (Last Summer), her first feature documentary which hit the film festival circuit in 2010, Venice Beach, CA is the fruit of a patient, shrewd and respectful observation and understanding of the particular soul of an iconic place.
In Venice Beach, CA, the director sets out to explore the relationship between a space and the people who experience it everyday. Filming only in the early morning, from about 5 am to 9 am, the director captured the daily routine of the numerous homeless people living on Venice Beach’s famous boardwalk, with a light deftness and no sense of intrusion. At this moment of the day, the sun is rising, the colors in the sky are changing even during one shot, and the poetry of the film’s visuals stand as a beautiful metaphor for an ever-changing context, and the lives of those homeless people who are always on the verge of something unexpected, and which are characterized by instability.
On screen, we are offered a collection of long, steady, immersive shots of the boardwalk. The richness of the cinematography allows the viewers to wander within the image, to spot a detail and follow it. This aspect, that we praised in A River Runs, Turns, Erases, Replaces, another delightful documentary presented at the 43rd Cinéma du réel, brings a lot of poetry and enables a profound immersion in the space that the director is focusing on. This is all the more relevant that as the sun is rising, the boardwalk starts to be humming with activity. This is the type of place where you will always find something to look at, to observe, to question, to wonder about. In this context, the director’s approach proves relevant and efficient.
In voice over, excerpts of exchanges with local homeless people are commenting on the place and their personal relationship with it. The thing is: we never get to see their faces. And director Marion Naccache deserves credit for such a smart, poetic setup, for at least two reasons. Firstly, Venice Beach being a famous, iconic touristic place during the day, the film seems to adapt to the fact that, as tourists, when having a walk on this busy, artsy boardwalk, we may tend to look away and not look at the homeless people. They do not belong to the post card, they should not be on it. What’s more, it’s slightly uncomfortable to be enjoying oneself, while facing such misery and the dramatic manifestation of the tremendous social inequalities raging across America. Anyway, in Venice Beach, CA, director Marion Naccache is not proposing us to finally look at them. She does more than that. She allows us to spend some time with them. At some point, I felt that the long, steady shots of the boardwalk were what I was seeing, sitting on the side of the boardwalk and watching life unfold in front of my eyes. And the homeless people speaking in voice over were sitting next to me, sharing their thoughts with me. It seemed a little bit like an out-of-body experience. Secondly, this setup proves extremely interesting insofar as, by juxtaposing the voices of the ones who truly belong to this place, because they stay here everyday, even when the tourists are gone at night, and all year long, the director has put together what seems like the soul of the place. Their collective voice, the assembly of each one’s experience and perception of the boardwalk, frame no less than the spirit of the place. And together, they are this place, they are Venice Beach, as suggested by the title of the film, probably aiming at understanding and defining what Venice Beach truly is.
Beside its relevant and poetic use of direct cinema to purely capture the spirit of Venice Beach and its homeless community, director Marion Naccache completed Venice Beach, CA folding in a very interesting theme. The director could have decided to edit the film in a chronological order, meaning that she could have recreated one morning, out of all the footage she had collected, after filming for days. Instead, the film is a constant juxtaposition of shots taken at night, then during the day, then in between, and so on. To me, this brilliant and inspired decision generates two reflections. The first one is the idea of the endless repetition of the homeless people’s lives in Venice Beach. Everyday, like in Groundhog Day (Dir. Harold Ramis, 1993), they wake up and accomplish the same routine, with no future prospects whatsoever. They are somehow trapped in time. One scene especially ranks as perhaps the most evocative moment of the film with regard to this idea. While we are offered a shot of the boardwalk, a man enters the frame, walks a few meters until he reaches nearly the center of the frame before unexpectedly turning back and walking back, exiting the frame at the exact same point he entered it a few seconds earlier. Which scene could have been better to convey this feeling of endless repetition? The second thought that I had while seeing the film constantly alternating between day-light and night-time shots, is that this gives the impression of a mental wander. To me, this dreamlike feeling echoes the collective voice presented by the film. We are a step beyond reality. We are dealing with the spirit of this place. And in this regard, the juxtaposition of the shots may seem like a collection of memories that the homeless people living everyday in this place may have in their head. Unlike a tourist who would keep a precise memory of the one time he or she walked down the boardwalk, the homeless people who spend their entire time there, witnessing everyday the same human choreography, have a wide range of visual memories of this place they belong to.
Like Sean Baker portrayed in The Florida Project (2017), many Americans live physically so close to the American dream while this dream remains out of reach for them. Venice Beach’s homeless community lives and evolves in between tourists, Santa Monica’s Amusement Park, the wealthy mansions of the city canals, and large corporations’ offices like Google or Snapchat.
In Venice Beach, CA, director Marion Naccache exposes the unseen. With respect and poetry, she crafts a beautiful tribute to the ones who are, in spite of everything, the soul of Venice Beach.
