Director: Leonor Teles
Writers: Francisco Mira Godinho, Leonor Teles, Ágata de Pinho
Stars: Carolina Miragaia, Meghna Lall
Synopsis: When Home stops feeling like one, wandering becomes routine. Time, space and emotions implode, blurring Lisbon with Bangkok. Past, present or perhaps future intertwine in a story that begins when L meets K.
Inspired by Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s masterwork Millennium Mambo, Leonor Teles’ latest work Baan, is a fragmented story about two lost souls who roam around the world searching for a place to call home. Some moments disorient the viewer due to the film’s stylistic storytelling choices. Yet, its wandering nature fits with the character’s constant ballads with love, time, and individualism.
So far this decade, plenty of films talk about people’s search for their own selves or how they fit in the world. There are various renditions of this classic tale. However, the most effective (and relatable) ones have been concocted in this modern era. There are the likes of Davy Chou’s Return to Seoul, Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World, as well as Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All. Another fitting into this category is Leonor Teles’ Baan, playing at this year’s Locarno Film Festival in the varied Concorso Internazionale slate. The Portuguese cinematographer-turned-filmmaker blends time and location to tell a puzzled piece about a young woman’s search for a place to call home and how she tries to overcome the misery attached to tenderness and devotion. Baan may not be the best example of its kind. But thanks to the leads’ performances, as well as a bold yet impressionistic stylish attire, its emotions are perceivable enough to withstand its narrative faults.
Baan begins with a shot of a woman, El (Carolina Miragaia), looking out of her window. The shades of dark blue in the skies and the silver buildings in the background offer a beautiful image that transmits her low spirits. This scene doesn’t last long; it transitions into El singing Banks’ ‘F*** Em Only We Know’ (from her debut record ‘Goddess’) into a man’s ears. That song is a ballad about star-crossed lovers longing to run away together; similar to the story of Romeo and Juliet, people doubt their love and future – which would later involve some form of emotional abuse. This is a strange song choice, and El sings it does so in a calmer, yet somewhat saddened, manner. But it hints at what might be coming for the characters in Leonor Teles’ film. Recognizing the song and its meaning, I seriously want to know their relationship status.
Later, we will receive more details about this pairing, which ends with the man rejecting El’s will to fight for their relationship. Via quick cuts and scenery changes, Teles takes us through various places in this woman’s life – a grocery store, her apartment, a nightclub, and a street in Bangkok. But there are two things in common with this mini collage of scenery swapping and the previous singing sequence: the woman still looks like she’s lonesome, and yet another great track about love backs the scenes, this time being Chaka Khan’s cover of ‘I Feel For You’ – a track about the power of love, both in its beauty and its imperfection. Most, if not all, of the songs in Baan’s jukebox are related to love and extremities of experience with relationships, whether good or slowly going bad.
Once the track ends, something strange happens with the film that fits with its constant changes – some of them fit perfectly into the scene, while others do not. El’s story begins to get fractured; her visions and experiences blur with one another – she’s in Bangkok, and, within minutes, it goes back to Lisbon. The film’s transition of fractured states begins with reference to a movie that inspired it, Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Millennium Mambo, specifically the aforementioned film’s introduction, where the main character walks through a tunnel passage in the dead of night under a row of fluorescent headlights. Like Vicky in Hsiao-Hsien’s masterwork, El looks back as if she’s leaving something behind and moving forward for new things, relating to her respective amounts of time in Bangkok and Lisbon. This specific scene is replicated on a couple of occasions throughout the film’s runtime, citing the development of a new chapter in the character’s search for individualism.
Blurred altogether, the audience, alongside El, feels trapped between the two cities, often going back to one another or both weirdly being together simultaneously through some details in the background. Sometimes, this transition from scene to scene feels a bit disorienting as the film continues. While the aspect of time is indeed a factor in her life, you can’t grasp it. Time flows differently and weirdly as it’s fragmented; the past, present, and future are mended together in a narrative concocted via memories and reflections. There are moments when you feel that this story-telling device is beginning to fracture the film itself. If you think about it further, it does fit with the lead character’s persona and development. Yet it is more of a slight nuisance rather than an effective stylistic choice if done without precision.
Baan focuses more on the bond between El and Kay (Meghna Lall), specifically the impact she had on her life – two lost souls who roam around the world in search of a place to call home. Their constant wandering from city to city makes them feel like they aren’t supposed to land anywhere. During one of their many conversations about their constantly shifting lives, El asks Kay about the reason why she didn’t stay in London, one of her many pit stops throughout her search for identity and sanctuary. Kay replies, “I felt like I never belonged there”. She also quotes an idiom that’s primarily used in Southern parts of the United States, “If it’d been a snake, it would have bitten you already”, stating that if one of those locations where Kay has traveled where the right fit to call home, she would have never left them.
As the two get along and, at the same time, separate from one another, the story begins to gain more emotional weight, elevated by the performances of Lall and Miragaia, both of which are brilliant in their respective portrayals. Yet, the former upstages due to her personal and humanistic expressionism. The camera always lingers for enough time that their facial expressions transmit the necessary emotions to us watching. When you add the cherry on top of the melancholic sundae that is the cinematography, shot by the director herself (who also worked on João Canijo’s brilliant double-film Mal Viver and Viver Mal), you end up with a collage-like expressive portrait of the struggle with identity in the modern era and the distance in heartache.
