Looking at Ruben Östlund’s recent, Palme d’Or-winning satires, Triangle of Sadness [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Ruben Östlund
intervista: Ruben Östlund
scheda film] and The Square [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Ruben Östlund
scheda film], both well-observed digs at the rich and powerful, you wonder what he might be tempted to target in his own milieu, the film industry. The means by which films are bought, sold and made, and their visibility in the marketplace, can feel as complex and sprawling as the world itself, echoing its power relations and national alliances perfectly. With his latest feature, Gavagai, German director Ulrich Köhler ventures into territory Östlund would usually thrive in, observing the microaggressions, bad-faith decisions, and insecure egotism that plagues the making of an internationally co-produced film, self-critically commenting on but never slipping into the rot he diagnoses. After its world premiere in the New York Film Festival’s Main Slate, which has always beat the drum for Köhler’s work, the movie is now screening in the Zurich Film Festival.

Raised in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) as the son of NGO health workers, Köhler has tended to return to the region of his birth for his filmmaking, first for his Berlin Silver Bear-winning work Sleeping Sickness [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Ulrich Kohler
scheda film], and now with the present film, directly inspired by his experience of making and then premiering the former. Nourou (Jean-Christophe Folly) and Maja (Maren Eggert) are actors on location in Senegal leading a postmodern adaptation of Euripides’ Medea, about the eponymous mythological figure shockingly driven to murder her own children. The director, Caroline (Nathalie Richard – reminiscent of Claire Denis for some older viewers, but possibly cast in light of her memorable role in Irma Vep, another film about the making of a film), is attempting an ambitious but potentially misguided interpretation of the original text, fashioning Maja’s character, Medea, into a white interloper shunned by Nourou’s Jason and his tribe of Argonauts, here depicted as black and indigenous to the setting of Corinth.

As the two actors begin a passionate affair in the privacy of the crew hotel, we see how Caroline’s grand folly overrides her noble artistic intentions with its inappropriateness and risk-taking, and overall, how the white creatives impose themselves on their surroundings, re-enacting a colonial relationship. The film’s title refers to a famous philosophical thought experiment, where an exclamation of the word “gavagai” when pointing towards a rabbit might not refer to the creature directly, hinting at the arbitrariness of language as a whole. Just like in Östlund’s films, Nourou and Maja’s language of professional decorum and caution fails to alert Caroline to the fact that something is going very wrong.

These issues are compounded when the completed movie premieres in the Berlinale the following winter (and Köhler intercuts several visually sumptuous excerpts of the festival across this section of the film), with the Potsdamer Platz Grand Hyatt and the Palast creating an unerringly accurate sense of the experience for industry delegates. Nourou is prevented from entering his luxury hotel by a racist security guard, allowing Maja to awkwardly intervene on his behalf as a putative “white saviour”; later on in the film, Caroline and her actors are confronted with a number of sceptical reactions at an awkward press conference. But Köhler’s own point-of-view reflects Caroline’s, and he avoids coming across as self-righteous. The film isn’t a lecture on best practice directed towards his own auteur colleagues. Instead, it’s a canny interrogation of how often politically motivated cinema actually struggles to communicate its message, and how an artist’s confused rather than clear intent can reveal the most perverse kind of integrity.

Gavagai was produced by Germany and France, courtesy of Sutor Kolonko in co-production with Good Fortune Films. World sales are being handled by Luxbox.