A
truck. A homicidal, ten-ton truck. To see Adolf Alix’s Chassis is to
step figuratively into the path of such an oncoming, runaway vehicle.
For good measure, the same truck will back up on your convulsing body
just to make sure it does the job. Alix’s latest film is just that,
unforgiving. Unforgiving; it spares nobody. Not the film’s diegetic
characters who must endure the grinding forces of poverty and harsh
circumstance. Not the viewing audience, no matter how prepared it
believes it is for a film like Chassis.
But
don’t get me wrong. The same uncompromising virtues are what makes
Chassis an ultimately commendable film. And I’m beginning to like it for
the same reasons that may ultimately discourage a wider patronage. As
with any genuine art, after all, common sensibilities are meant to be
shocked and scandalized. It’s often ahead of its time. This is not to
say, though, that Chassis is a work of such ground-breaking originality.
One will recoil from this realization: that it’s a pauperized version
of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman.
I
say “pauperized” for several reasons. One, Chassis is a literal
pauperization, the story is transplanted to an impoverished scenario.
Unlike the domesticated Jeanne Dielman, the heroine of Chassis is a
woman without a home. Nora inhabits no living space of her own, but a
parking lot in a harbor compound, where the underside of her chosen
cargo truck serves as her roof. Like a hermit cab without a shell, she
must look constantly for a home to live under. She must lug her few
belongings – a cardboard mat, a few clothes, a few cooking utensils –
from one chassis to another, at the mercy of the trucks’ brisk
schedules. Two, what Akerman takes a monumental 201 minutes to dramatize
and make a statement, Alix accomplishes in a dense and intense 73
minutes, a veritable slice of life.
Chassis,
like Akerman’s film, however, is about self-sacrifice, an entrapment in
helpless circumstance, and what happens when one’s reason for it ceases
to exist. In Chassis, Nora is a woman trapped in a cycle of poverty and
prostitution. She resigns herself to selling herself very cheaply in
order to support a hand-to-mouth existence for herself, her lover and
her young, uncomprehending daughter.
Her daughter represents the last consolation, a final lifeline, for whom she can sustain her state of indignity. She will put her through school on any pain. She will promise her what she can only grant through acts that degrade her in the eyes of everybody. Her smile is reserved just for her child. Never for anyone else, not for her lover, not for the truck drivers who use her like so much latrine, not her demi-monde kind in this compound, not for the Mormon missionary who tries to evangelize her.
Her daughter represents the last consolation, a final lifeline, for whom she can sustain her state of indignity. She will put her through school on any pain. She will promise her what she can only grant through acts that degrade her in the eyes of everybody. Her smile is reserved just for her child. Never for anyone else, not for her lover, not for the truck drivers who use her like so much latrine, not her demi-monde kind in this compound, not for the Mormon missionary who tries to evangelize her.
Everything
about Chassis is grim and dreary. Depicted in ominous tones of
black-and-white, it seems forever set in a twilight hour. One never
knows whether it’s lightening or darkening. All one senses is its
sepulchral nature. The gargantuan specters of cargo ships and maritime
industry, meanwhile, tower in the distance, as though never to stop for
the negligible fates of humanity. But what stays with us, more
crucially, is the film’s chiaroscuro portrait of a woman with nowhere to
go: Nora, with her funereal mask of a face, her sleep-walking steps,
her lifeless stance – the shorthand of wretched resignation.
While
the last drastic gesture of Jeanne Dielman is born out of a long,
cumulative process of prostitution and thankless domesticity, we can
pinpoint the last straw that produces Nora’s act of rebellion. With
Nora’s raison d’etre intact, however, it is foreseeable that she could
go on and on indefinitely as a martyrized woman. Whether, like Jeanne
Dielman, Chassis will become a feminist favorite, however, remains to be
seen. Viewers have been reportedly put off by its unrelieved bleakness
and hopelessness, remarking how utterly different Alix has turned out to
be since the days of Donsol and Kadin. But that’s beside the point. To
repress the reality depicted in Chassis just to humor our squeamish
bourgeois sensibilities is just wrong; more mistaken when we do nothing from
the comfort of our armchairs.
reviewed: December 5, 2010
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