REVIEW: Here (dir. Braden King)

Cast: Ben Foster, Lubna Azabal, Christina Hovaguimyan, Narek Nersisyan

There is emerging from the US a cluster of filmmakers possessing not only a gutsy and unpredictable artistic temperament, but also a wonderfully casual and intuitive grasp of genre conventions. Perhaps the best American film of 2010, Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone was a stunning example of a film noir, subverted by a young female lead, and twisted into some barren, ghoulish exploitation movie. It was Chinatown by way of Deliverance, with some other powerful emptiness besides. And in 2009 there was Ballast, a stirring and guttural study of a young black boy’s broken home. He totes a gun and gets in trouble with other youths, but the slumbering power of Lance Hammer’s film is closer to Béla Tarr than Spike Lee.

Braden King’s feature debut, Here, is a languid and ethereal take on another iconic Hollywood staple: the romantic road movie. But King lifts his story up off the comfortable blacktops of California and drops it into the harsh reality of Armenia’s border country. With all the ripened layers of Hollywood comfort and artifice stripped away, we are left alone with a lonely alcoholic geologist (Ben Foster) and a dissatisfied, pretty photographer (Lubna Azabal), travelling across a dangerous but muted landscape of mishmash fields. Yet somewhere deep inside, this film is still attuned to Frank Capra’s heartbeat. It is Andrzej Wajda by way of It Happened One Night, and it is mesmerising.

Will Shepard travels the world plotting landscapes for a Californian satellite navigation company. He has the stillness of a man who has learnt to be alone; but he is far from antisocial, and rarely does a day go by that he doesn’t end by drinking the night away with some aging vodka-soaked local. Gadarine is on her way back to her hometown after a long absence; but when Will offers her a lift she decides to join him beyond her original destination, and acts as his interpreter and guide as he heads off into Armenia’s dangerous, disputed territories.

They fall in love peacefully, journeying through the mountains and visiting some of Gadarine’s old friends and family. But as the landscape changes the tone darkens, and we begin to see the chasm that has always existed between these two lonely souls. Gadarine is dealing with old memories of her homeland; she has travelled the world trying to escape the powerful whirlwind of her country’s history, but she will never forget. Will is the ‘Yank’ who won’t take a second to think about anything that happened a second ago: he is the “quiet American” who thinks the past belongs to the Greeks, and the future belongs to whoever can trace its contours first. It is an easy dialectic, but it is plotted in such a simple and methodical way that it never feels laboured.

It is difficult to imagine the film without Ben Foster’s stirring performance. He is effortlessly charming and somehow manages to channel the excitable glint of Cary Grant or Richard Burton through the weary eyes of a geologist on a shrinking planet. But the angry, passive aggressive twitch that characterised his youthful performances in Six Feet Under and Alpha Dog is still there. It is the twitch of a dissatisfied man who doesn’t know where to scratch to make the emptiness go away. It turns every smile into a buried smirk, and every shot of vodka into a “running away from something”.

If there is a line that can be plotted through these films, it is the influence of cinematographer Lol Crawley, whose captivating ‘cinéma vérité’ camerawork and use of natural light forms the aesthetic basis for both Ballast and Here. Through Crawley’s camera, the settings are rendered in an effortlessly realistic and breathtakingly beautiful fashion. There is no unnecessary magic used to create some Ruskin landscape. This is a stark, sleek, undisturbed view of a bewitching part of the world that most of us will never see.