Here

dir: Bas Devos

2023

This flick called Here should not be confused with the Robert Zemeckis directed, Tom Hanks and Robin Wright starring flick called Here that came out last year. Totally different movies. Could not be more different. Each interesting in its own way, but completely different.

This here flick called Here, or Heɿe, if you believe the opening credits/title is a prime exponent of “slow” cinema, in that there is no hurry in any scene for anything to happen or anyone to do anything. There are people in the story, actors, I believe they’re called, and stuff happens, but it’s of the mundane, every day, slice of life sort of stuff.

And lots of images of nature, and mosses. Lots of mosses.

You should absolutely already know whether this is your own personal vision of hell or not by now. It didn’t aggravate me at all, but then I have the patience of a fucking saint, so, there’s that to consider.

Not everyone has either the time or the inclination to sit through something in which not a lot happens, and that is the point. Me, I sometimes relish chances to watch slow, meditative stuff, even if there’s not that much to meditate on or ruminate over. We bring what we have to these kinds of films, because they rarely tell us exactly what to think about what we’re seeing.

There is a chap, and he works in construction, as in, on a construction site for a skyscraper somewhere in Brussels. He, like his co-workers, is getting ready for his summer holidays, with construction industry folks taking 4 weeks off over summer. He is not Belgian, and, as a Romanian, is intending to drive home.

He looks at the veggies in his fridge, and thinks “these will all be rotten when I get back; I better make something with them now”, so he makes a big pot of soup. This soup will play an extraordinarily important role in the film.

I’m not actually joking. Our chap, often clad in t-shirt, shorts and flip flops, suffers from insomnia, so he either walks around at night or visits people he knows are awake. He visits a friend who works the night shift at a hotel and gives him soup. He visits his mechanic, whose says his car will be ready Tuesday, and once he offers the soup, the mechanic says the car will be ready Monday. He visits his sister who’s a nurse at a local hospital, and they enjoy the soup together. Everyone loves the soup.

What’s so special about the soup? Nothing, as far as I could tell, other than that people appreciate that he made the soup, and it shows the ways that he is connected to these various people, even when he himself doesn’t know if he really wants to come back when his vacation is over.

It is perhaps stakes for him, but it would barely rank as stakes for us. We don’t know the guy. He seems like an okay chap. I was worried that the flick would have him revealed as a serial killer or something at one point. But, really, he’s a harmless guy who just likes wandering around and briefly and politely interacting with people.

In parallel to his story, out of nowhere we start hearing a voiceover, speaking in Mandarin, talking about someone who had dreamed that she woke up one morning having forgotten the names for all the things surrounding her. In this moment she is one with ten thousand things, the way we imagine animals to be, most beings in nature. They “know” what they know, without the construct of language, and the separation it brings, and are thus connected to all.

We then see this person who was narrating, as a lecturer at a university, Shu Xiu (Liyo Gong), who spends most of the movie looking at mosses either with her magnifying glass or with a microscope. Her path crosses with the main guy, and that’s about it. When she talks about her work as a bryologist, specialising in mosses, don’t you know, he seems curious despite, you know, the fact that it’s a less than thrilling topic of conversation.

Unlike other films I saw last year that promised to teach me something about dry grasses or seagrass or beekeeping and gave me nothing but heartbreak, this flick actually teaches us a thing about mosses: they were the first plants to grow on land in Earth history.

Now that’s a valuable fact for ya. There’s also a great (okay) moment where one guy mansplains to another that this location that they’re looking at the trains, is the first place in all of Europe to first get trains. And then he beautifully botches it by saying “it happened in 18-something…”

Vital facts. Vital facts for concerned viewers.
I’m relating these elements, these things that happened, and it’s not really going to give a sense of what watching the flick is like. It’s so leisurely in its pacing that it really feels like it’s only about whatever we’re seeing at any given moment. It might be about the main character’s quandary about whether to stay or go, but it’s really about whether he has enough connections to the people around him in order to want to come back.

And it’s about nature, and how it just does its thing, whether we’re involved or not.

I would be lying if I said that I was enthralled throughout. It’s too ineffable, too light and ephemeral, and yet at other times clunky and obvious. Is there any actual depth in these relationships that the movie conjures? I don’t know. If you think about the conversations you might have with strangers over the course of a day, they may be moments where there’s connection or depth but mostly, like with almost every conversation between co-workers, or in an elevator, it’s bullshit like “great weather we’re having” or “how about that local sports team?”

This flick honours every interaction, not as being Important, necessarily, but as indicating that we’re all connected and our main guy is generally pretty honest and open with the people he speaks to. He has nothing to hide, but his aimless and restless nature makes everything feel transitory, impermanent, which I guess everything must be.

It takes a certain set of skills, and a certain level of commitment to make films like these, and I guess the people involved here know what they’re doing. I would not say this is a film about vibes, or about hanging out; that would make it seem like there was far more of a plan than I think there was. The seeming connection between our guy and Shu Xiu in any other film would be a meet cute that led to a potential romance, but that seems like it would be out of place in this flick, one in which overt emotion would seem to be out of place.

There is intention throughout, and careful use of sound design and soundtrack to achieve that, with grainy film stock and an unusual use of 4:3 aspect ratio to maybe narrow our field of vision, and thus make everything seem more close, more intimate.

It’s only 80 or so minutes as well, which, for a “slow” movie, is probably a godsend – if you’re bored by it, well it’s going to be over soon, and if you’re in love with it, it leaves you wanting more. I also appreciated the novel way the credits were done at the end of the flick, which ends on a gag that is actually quite funny (and therefore out of place with everything that happened before).

7 times you should Be Here Now out of 10

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“They touched your heart. That’s a big deal.” - Here

https://www.imdb.com/video/vi2161755673/?playlistId=tt26448954&ref_=tt_o...