La
Terre Abandonnee: Directed by Gilles Laurent, camera by Laurent
Fenart. Running Time: 73 minutes.
Rating:
4/4
One
of the most fascinating after-effects of the March 2011 tsunami and nuclear
disaster at Fukushima has been the brutally clear glimpses it provides of what
can happen when modern human towns are suddenly abandoned; how nature slowly
reclaims what belongs to it; what it feels like to walk down streets still
plastered with all the accoutrements of modern life, yet utterly devoid of
people.
The
best art is able to confront this dissonance head-on, and The Abandoned Land, the first- and due to his untimely death in an
ISIS-inspired attack in Belgium last year, last- film directed by Belgian sound
engineer Gilles Laurent, is a considerably powerful example of this. The shots Laurent presents of places left to
rot feel unreal, almost staged, like they are too perfectly apocalyptic. Except, of course, they aren’t, despite the
powerful sense one gets watching this film that you are glimpsing a place lost
to the sands of time; they are very much real, and are very much here, right
now.
Caught
within this strange wormhole are a handful of stubborn residents of the town of
Tomioka, located right nearby Ground Zero of the Fukushima catastrophe. For various reasons, these handful of older
residents either stayed put after the meltdown, or returned very quickly
afterwards. They now truly live on the
very edge of society- the government knows they’re there, but seems unwilling
or incapable of forcing them to move, so they are let be, and live pretty much
as they can, even growing and eating food out of soil supposed to be too
irradiated to be safe for farm use.
Mostly
seen as a curiosity, they continue their lives even as government
decontamination efforts continue around them.
The shots of these people wearing regular clothes, open to the air and
sun, alongside radiation workers covered head-to-foot in full-body protective
suits almost feels like an endless, silent joke the movie is letting us in
on. The same goes for the shots of sings
and awareness campaigns from either the company or the local government about
how important the environment and health is to them, as run-down and overgrown
as the rest of the abandoned lands they are found in. It is jarring. It is dissonant, but also darkly comic (in a
very Dr. Strangelove sort of way), and
no active commentary is needed.
The
movie is suffused with themes of dying and passing away as a part of nature; it
must happen so that life may move forward and something new may rise from the
wreckage of the old. These forgotten
people in these forgotten lands know that the towns and communities of their
past lives are gone forever, and that things can never return to how they once
were. Something new will surely come
around eventually to take its place, but they won’t live to see it, and their
acceptance of this fact and resolve to live on in spite of it is a mixture of pitiful,
heartbreaking, courageous, and beautiful.
Laurent
had mostly worked in sound prior to making this movie. Friends said he could see sounds the way most
directors see color and light, and this talent is on full display here. Sounds of the natural world ping in and out,
adding layers and texture to everything we see that mere imagines could not
fully convey.
It’s
almost ironic, that Laurent’s first feature film would focus so much on death
and ending, and be followed by his own violent and untimely death last
year. It lends a sadder weight to
everything we see, especially when the director makes a brief cameo about
halfway through the film. Even though we
otherwise never see or hear him- he was known for having a keen sense of the
importance of removing oneself from the subject in documentary work- the
knowledge that he’s there, behind the camera, and soon won’t be there, and
indeed will never be there again, is inescapable.
The Abandoned Land is a masterful and
important piece of documentary filmmaking from a talented filmmaker who was
taken from us far too soon. Despite
this, I am confident that it will stand the test of time as a fitting legacy to
both the man who made it, and the people it focuses on, allowing both some
measure of deserved immortality.
-Noah Franc
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