Limbo/Murina

Perth Festival/Lotterywest Films, UWA Somerville 

By Wolfgang von Flugelhorn 

 

Some years ago, I went on a cycling tour in the Scottish islands while engaged in para-phenomenological research and was fascinated and humbled by the landscape, history, culture and people. 

Scottish filmmaker Ben Sharrock's Limbo (screening at Somerville from January 17 to 23) is set on a remote island in the Outer Hebrides. The film focusses on a group of four asylum seekers living in a shared house while awaiting the processing of their claims for refugee status. The central character Omar (Amir El-Masri) is Syrian; his friend Farhad (Vikash Bhai) is from Afghanistan; Abedi (Kwabeda Ansah) and his putative brother Wasef (Ora Oyebiyi) are from Nigeria.

 

Limbo is largely shot on the island of Uist, but in the film both the island and the men’s situation are fictional. As Sharrock has acknowledged in interviews, refugees whose claims are accepted by the UK have indeed been sent to live in remote island communities in Scotland; but offshore detention (either in camps or in the community) of asylum seekers awaiting processing (as practised by Australia) has mercifully not (yet) been adopted by the UK. Indeed, strong objections by human rights groups were made when Boris Johnson and his Home Secretary Priti Patel floated the idea last year, and the proposal was hastily abandoned.

 

This element of fictionalisation is potentially misleading (especially for an Australian audience). It also has implications for the credibility of the plot: for example, when the two Nigerians are forcibly arrested (presumably for deportation) by police breaking into the house halfway through the film; and the frozen corpse of one of them is later found in the wilderness (presumably after having attempted to escape) by a traumatised Omar. Audience members around me were shocked by these scenes, but for me the sense of hyperbole weakened the film’s case, despite my sympathy with its intentions.

 

Despite Sharrock spending time on Uist while writing the screenplay, and the undoubted rigours involved in shooting there, paradoxically the film feels as though it could have been shot anywhere. The representation of the island community is largely confined to a few comic-eccentric, unsympathetic or hostile stereotypes, most of which are written and performed in a clichéd ‘deadpan’ style. Possibly this is intended to reflect the experience of asylum-seekers and refugees, but it felt like a somewhat one-dimensional portrayal of that experience (and of remote island communities). 

 

The visual language of the film (strikingly composed and shot by cinematographer Nick Cooke) exacerbates this problem. Like Wes Anderson’s recent film The French Dispatch, Limbo is mostly framed in a ‘boxed-in’ 4:3 ratio (apart from the final scene of the film, which is in conventional widescreen format), and shot in long takes by a motionless or very slowly moving camera. Within each shot, people, buildings, vehicles and objects like telephone booths, streetlights or playground equipment are ‘placed’ apparently at random in relation to their environment, dressed or painted in colours like blue or pink that deliberately clash with the green-and-grey of the island vegetation, and mostly positioned at the centre of the frame on the horizon line of an otherwise apparently unpopulated wilderness. There is also little narrative logic or sense of how much time has passed from one scene to the next. Again, this cumulative effect of spatial and temporal dislocation, artificiality, incongruity and isolation may have been intended to reflect the experience of the asylum seekers, but it feels like a somewhat stilted representation of island life. 

 

In general, the absurdist style and content reminded me of the films of Palestinian director/actor Elia Suleiman and Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismäki (and before them Jacques Tati). However, these filmmakers have a far more nuanced aesthetic and socio-political vision. Their films are also much funnier. Audience members around me were laughing at the scenes in which the asylum seekers are forced to take ‘cultural awareness’ classes at the hands of the humourless Helga (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and hapless Boris (Kenneth Collard), but I found these scenes painfully forced and condescending.

 

The film works best when focussed solely on the asylum seekers themselves, whether as figures in the landscape or literally ‘boxed’ inside their house. Their characters, stories and performances are allowed to unfold and open up (in contrast with those of the islanders), especially in the case of El-Masri as Omar and Bhai as Farhad, though for me the outstanding performance in the film comes from Kais Nashef (superb in Hany Abu-Assad’s drama about suicide bombers, Paradise Now) in an unexpected late appearance as Omar’s brother Nabil. 

 

As my old friend Hannah Arendt wrote about the paradoxical state of ‘statelessness’ (the German term heimatlos might be more poignantly translated as ‘without a homeland’), asylum seekers are excluded not only from a territory or place to belong, but from the legal or political rights that go with it (including, as Arendt put it, even ‘the right to have rights’). This does not exclude them from representation, either through realism or allegory (Kafka and Beckett come to mind). Limbo seems to fall between these two stools into its own generic ‘limbo’ – or perhaps into the ‘fish-out-of-water’ or ‘quirky independent film’ genre, which borrows the stylistic tics of absurdism while remaining ostensibly realistic in content. (I had similar misgivings about Roberto Benigni’s comedy-drama about the HolocaustLife Is Beautiful. Chaplin’s Great Dictator or Lubitsch’s To Be Or Not To Be on the other hand manage to poke fun at Nazism by locating themselves in the parallel universe of Chaplinesque vaudeville or the theatrical fantasy-world of Lubitschland.)

 

The most interesting scene in Limbo for me is the surreal encounter between Omar and his brother Nabil in an abandoned cottage in the wilderness, partly because the encounter is clearly paranormal or possibly a dream/fantasy. Conversely, I found the final scene of Omar’s concert in the village hall (which is shot in widescreen to signify his sense of liberation) when he plays his oud like a virtuoso (the intercutting is obvious) sentimental and fake. Possibly this scene too is meant to be a fantasy; if so it feels like a falsely consoling one.

 

We are left with a final shot of Omar walking away up a road. We don’t know how much time has passed, what’s happened, or where he’s going. Once again, perhaps the meaning of the shot is intentionally unclear. To me however it felt like he was still boxed-in by Sharrock’s film.

 

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The night after seeing Limbo I attended a preview screening of Murina, the debut feature by Croatian filmmaker Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović, which screens at Somerville from 31 January to 6 February.

 

The title refers to the Croatian word for the moray eel, and the plot concerns a Croatian fishing family. Julija (Gracija Filipović) is a rebellious teenager who dives for eels with her domineering father Ante (Leon Lučev), while the latter keeps both his daughter and his complaint wife Nela (Danica Ćurčić) firmly under his control. Their emotionally and financially precarious existence is disrupted by a visit from a wealthy friend, Javier (New Zealand actor Cliff Curtis), whom Ante is hoping will buy and develop a portion of his land. However, it gradually emerges that Javier was Ante’s former employer and once had an affair with Nela. Residual tensions resurface and are stirred up further by Julija, who is fascinated by Javier (both sexually and as an alternative father-figure) and sees him as a means of escape from her father and his world.  

 

In a sense Murina is a coming-of-age drama, with an added sense of latent violence which ratchets up the tension almost to the level of a thriller. Finely judged performances from all the leads (but particularly Ćurčić as a woman trapped in an abusive relationship and trying to keep her family intact while still in love with another man who also objectifies her) are supported by a tight script and direction, with a clear-eyed focus on the nuances of coercive control. 

 

Like Limbo, Murina features a spectacular island location, in this case on the Adriatic coast, not far from where my parents honeymooned in Dubrovnik. However, it features far more nuanced writing, acting and direction than Limbo, as well as more (appropriately) fluid and dynamic camerawork and editing. In particular, the film boasts a series of alternately dreamlike and dramatic underwater sequences involving Julija (Filipović is also a professional swimmer) that had me literally holding my breath. French cinematographer Hélène Louvart also worked on Wim Wender’s immersive 3D documentary Pina, and more recently Maggie Gyllenhaal’s psychological drama The Lost Daughter, a film which also makes sensuous and complex use of a seaside location. In Murina the rocky coastline becomes an emotional landscape that reminded me of Antonioni’s L’Avventura or Godard’s Contempt, films which also use rocky coastal settings to explore domestic and erotic tensions. If Murina doesn’t have the same underlying level of existential despair as those films, it makes up for that with a more acute contemporary sense of feminine subjectivity, gender and class politics. For those who shy away from Antonioni or Godard, it’s also considerably shorter and more exciting.

 

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Limbo screened from Jan 17 to 23 at UWA Somerville as part of Perth Festival/Lotterywest Films. Murina screens from Jan 31 to Feb 6.

 

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Wolfgang von Flugelhorn is a writer, critic and non-conceptual artist based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born in Flugelhorn, a small town in Upper Austria, in 1963. He is editor of the Zeitschrift für Unsozialforschung (Journal of Anti-Social Research) and Emeritus Professor at the University of Lower Flugelhorn where he holds a chair in Paranormal Phenomenology while engaging his core muscles for two minutes every day. He is the author of several monographs including Unlogische Untersuchungen (Illogical Investigations), Sein Unzeitlich (Not Being On Time) and Wahnsinn und Methode (Madness and Method), all of which have been translated into English by Humphrey Bower but none of which has yet been published in any language.