Crossings is a film that comes back from afar. Released in 1982 and first film by his director, Mahmoud ben Mahmoud, it had a great impact on the Arab world upon its exit, before gradually disappearing from collective memory... Thanks to the Cinematek's initiative, the film was restored in 2021 and can start talking about it again. An autobiographical narrative, he highlighted the sometimes absurd situation of borders and already portrayed the complex migration situation in his time. Its contemporaneity could make it pale more than one, as if nothing had changed in forty years.
A technique that goes through time
A boat leaves the port. Behind him, the dock moves away. Slowly, the hold closes, until the light passes away. Generic. Next plan, a lateral journey on a queue, filled with people of diverse and varied origins. As the camera slowly pulls up its tail, buffer planes fall like the authoritarian cutters of the customs officers they are, haunting the clear movement of the camera. Not a single word has yet been spoken, no character has ever been seen that everything is already there. The boat as a place deprived of liberty. The horizon disappears without return. The supreme power of customs officers, armed with their tampons. Their authority alone decides the fate of the little people who move forward.
The film has hardly begun that a true intelligence of editing offers to the viewer. And that doesn't detract from the rest of the movie. It is the work of Moufida Tlatli, a regular of Tunisian assembly benches. Eight years later, she won the Golden Camera in Cannes for The silences of the palace, a film written, directed and edited by him. The restoration is also of exemplary quality. The photograph of Gilberto Azevedo is striking and has no doubt regained its superb past. At the end of the session, the director confided in his film all the defects proper to a first jet, but the images are there to deny it.
Comedians who cross the screen
The two main actors, Fadhel Jaziri and Julian Negulesco, splatter the film with all their presence. They are Youssef and Bogdar, Tunisian anarchist and Slavic communist respectively. Denied both at the British border and at the Belgian border, they found themselves blocked on the ferry, in a series of round trips between Ostend and Dover. Nobody knows what to do with these two strangers that everything opposes. By the force of things, their respective solitudes bring them closer. They care as they can, caught in the loop of their condition. Philosophical and political discussions animate their days, each exhibiting its own vision of the world and stoking at nightfall. Crossings is paradoxically a film that is both talkative and introspective, for Youssef, his main character, remains resolutely mutic. He finds in his silence the freedom that is refused to give him.
One last crossing for the road...
Then comes the moment to break the energy put in place until then. End the duo. While desperation pushes Bogdar to find a dramatic exit door (again in a brilliantly mounted sequence), Youssef finds himself alone. The dynamics of the film change completely, returning even more into introspection. As if, from now on, far from the snail of the Slav, the thoughts of our protagonist would be heard. But Nature can't stand the emptiness and very quickly, a new encounter will allow Youssef to fill his solitude. The romance that begins then makes it vaporous and mysterious, this ferry before so heavy. Youssef's infinite crossings did not end, but they took a smoother turn. A turning point that will also push the film to loosen its embrace so cleverly held so far. He loses power in one last act what he gains in dreaming optimism. A point of disappointment that does not diminish the rest of the film, whose particular strength still haunts me when writing these lines.
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