"Those who are fine" (Cybil Schaublin, 2017) are not fine: On certain powers of abstraction
Cinema as a power of abstraction, whose politics at its most interesting may depend upon a visible translation from affect deprived of all resonance but clinging to character and story, toward a thematization of images, statements, and interactions into gestures whose meaning is at some remove for the intentions of those performing them. Often the object of polemic in the 1960s and avant-garde traditions generally, today this is, like all possibilities in film’s syntax, one among others that may be usefully deployed for a purpose. And so in the enigmatically titled, “Those who are free,” a new film by Swiss German director Cyril Schaublin that screened recently at the annual New Directors/New Films festival at MoMA and Lincoln Center.
Viewers uncertain about the director’s political purposes might find comfort in knowing that the director’s next film will be about anarchist thinker Mikhail Bakunin. I was reminded more than anything of Bresson’s l’Argent, though this film falls short of Bresson’s extreme formal rigor. As I observe in my piece on that film on this site, it makes an argument of sorts out of montages of gestures, physical exchanges, doors closing, etc., offering us a wholly depersonalized world, though Bresson deplores as moral alienation what Schaublin with his deliberately dehydrated characterizations investigates coldly as what is indeed a world of coldness, but lacking the ethical dimension in Bresson of concern for lots souls. The film’s central character is a cipher, though some attention is given to the camera’s interrogation of her face. Perhaps the neotony of a 30-year old woman’s face (in contrast to her 80-year old female victims) disposes us to at least want to believe she is a person who wants to be nice and not the mere sociopath she is paid to be by her telecommunications firm that profits by cheating old people with telephone scams about distant grandchildren with an urgent need for cash. We never learn anything really about this woman, whose affectless face suggests neither (quite) humanity nor its affectively registrable negation; neither hope nor despair. Superficially, the film is largely a detective story, but again looks deceive.
For the film is not structured by its plot. We see images of Zurich’s buildings, streets, and surrounding highways, some of them slightly suggesting the visual poetry of Antonioni. But Antonioni’s aesthetic was part of an ethical quest for a happier form of life; this is a film that offers no glimmers of utopia. There are also several situations (they are not quite stories), which are grouped into types: Two investment bankers, one of whom wears plastic gloves, repeatedly greeting in a friendly manner potential investors, including the girl. There are also helmeted cops, reference to some terrorist event earlier, these cops mainly shown in conversation; these scenes have no clear relation to the scam plot. And what are the conversations about? Almost everyone in the film defines their own desires in terms of the mundane monetary concerns of lower middle-calls men and women with petty ambitions that are never connected to any visible idea of the good life. We also see how the consumer bankers work when dealing with customer requests that turn out to be compliance with what they do not realize is fraud. And we see the call center workers, at the scam business, and observe how they speak to themselves and their telephoned suckers.
The conversation with each other of the helmeted police officers at the end is about a film a female officer remembers. That film is about an act of terrorism blowing up a bank, with all the money flying in the air. I read this as saying that the world depicted in this film is defined by a certain imaginary, and such apocalyptic imaginings and fears are part of it.
Clearly, reacting to this film with the moral outrage, or ironic compassion, we might feel if the film were really about the crime, as if that crime is an exemption to a business as normal that can be comforting to recognize and affirm, would be a misreading. The director wants instead to give us images of contemporary capitalism that seem to exclude any kind of hope.
It is an image that is rather sad, sadder even then the old women’s being defrauded, and sadder too than the young woman’s horrible dispassion. I am reminded of Guy Debord’s statement that our society increasingly only expresses the desire to sleep. You could even think that the film’s principal characters are all, like many people today, like sleepwalkers.
Sometimes the purest and most incisive social visions in art are dispassionate to the point of depersonalization, a term the director agreed with me on in the Q. and A, while noting that he meant for the girl’s character and motives to remain enigmatic. The social vision then is all the stronger for not being psychological, and its politics not moral. When such a world is sufficiently sad and ugly to leave us both annoyed and bored (in some languages, these are the same word), we may read them in search of an outside. But a pure outside might be purely imaginary, and a construction from “within,” and so an illusion, like the dreams of people who themselves are living our bad dream.
Who are “those who are fine”? Meaning that some people are happy, or at least in their own eyes, have lives that are ok? On this question, I think the film offers two possible answers to this title that is obviously meant to be a question. Either some people are happy, and the characters in this film know or suspect this, though they and we don’t know who exactly these happy people are. (Do the girl and her scam company think they are ripping off people who can afford it because their lives are “fine,” while everyone else’s isn’t?) Or the people we see have lives that are not really problematic, or not supposed to be, but this thought itself is index of the alienation in this. Or Switzerland’s banking economy promises like capitalism generally, not well-being but ok-being, not happiness but fineness. And this fineness is squalid and everyone who buys into this world, as we all do and must, is caught up in petty concerns like how to buy some commodity at the cheapest price. The film presents a society centered around the extraction and investment of money and policing. This society constantly suggests that if we all just trust the authorities, things will be fine. That is, there will be no problems, no one will be cheated or anything else; the state does not offer a happy life but will protect you against dangers to fine-ness. Ultimately, of course, the only thing that would not be ok with the authorities might just be if you feel or think, live as if or show, that things are not-ok.