Barbie, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, Dream Scenario, Beau is Afraid, Bardo, Nope, Poor Things… a lot of today’s movies are set in surreal worlds. There is something medieval in this quirky otherworldliness populated by figures that Hieronymus Bosch could have painted. But what’s truly interesting is that we are no longer asked to choose between the red pill and the blue pill, between the ‘true’ reality, always hidden from us, and a presumably fake one.
When in Barbie the toy characters travel to the real world, which ironically happens to be Venice Beach, it is as unreal as the toy one they come from: a mother handles a car like a Formula One driver, corporate offices look straight from a Tati movie, and there is a door that will lead you into another world where you can have tea and biscuits with your maker. In Everything, Everywhere, All at Once we simply lose track of what world is real. The same goes in the well-titled Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths by Alejandro Iñáritu. In these movies, there is no ‘way back to the real world’ as was the case with movies from the late nineties such as Matrix, The Truman Show, Being John Malkovich, or Inception. The dialectic of real versus surreal is not at play anymore. Everything is now surreal… or rather, reality is denied its uniqueness.
In the most mind-blowing of reversals, when we are given to see the reality around us, it is filmed as a peculiar world to visit. And as if we are not clever enough to see things for ourselves, we are given guides, that is, actors in charge of showing us “how it is out there”. Of course, reality resists. I walked out of Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland (2020) taken aback by how displaced Frances McDormand seemed to be. She looked like an expatriate in a foreign country, showing us around while trying to appear as much as ‘part of the locals’ as she could. Playing a role in a real-world setting with non-actors invariably looks a bit silly. It felt as if the poor unrooted women of Nomadland were doing a favor to McDormand by pretending for our sake that she is not who she is.
This reminded me of Ingrid Bergman in Rossellini’s movies. From Abbas Kiarostami’s fictions bleeding into documentaries to Italian neorealism, many directors before Zhao explored the blurred lines between drama and documentaries. This muddled ground is not without its pitfalls, some ethical. Indeed the real world is asked to be magnanimous and play along, but when not properly coached (don’t look at the camera!), it stares back in wonder as if asking: “What are you trying to make me pass for?” There is a scene in Stromboli where Ingrid Bergman talks to a local boy who is not an actor. The boy does not “play” in return. Puzzled, he looks at the famous actress rather than the character she is presumed to be. In the split second of his dumbfounded glance, reality makes a joke of both the actress and the filmmaker’s attempt at ‘creating reality’.
I call Celeb-realism any movie that has a star as a central character dropped into real settings with non-actors. A year after Nomadland came Between Two Worlds (2021) by Emmanuel Carrère, the European version of the former. In this film, Juliette Binoche works on a ferry line at Caen side by side with real deckhands. She is presumed to play an investigative journalist who poses as a cleaner to expose worker exploitation. Binoche’s character says she wants to “make visible the Invisibles” but beyond the social exploitation narrative, the invisible she is making visible is the real world. Like McDormand, Binoche is out of place, indeed between two worlds, except that the real world is not the one the actress comes from but the one she is visiting along with the audience. When she poses with the real-world workers, what should have been a still for the press now looks like the selfie of a tourist posing with ‘locals’.
Beyond the cheap thrill of watching McDormand or Binoche without makeup, we never forget who they are. It’s this discrepancy that makes us realize that their main role is not the parts they are asked to play but to be our tour guides. It’s McDormand and Binoche who show and maintain the distance from the reality they explore. Unlike in traditional fiction where we would forget about them as actresses, here we never lose sight of their status.
Frances McDormand invites us to sit near her to listen to Bob Wells like a docent would invite us to sit and look at a famous painting. Juliette Binoche shows us how a France-to-Britain ferry can be cleaned in 90 minutes like a local guide would show us how a fisherman does his work. The ‘stories’ in these movies hardly matter. The stars are not there to give us more fiction but to chaperone us into the real world.
These two movies hide their inner logic under social justice narratives, others don’t even bother. My all-time favorite local guide is Benoît Magimel in Albert Serra’s Pacifiction (2022). Magimel strolls around Tahiti in a white suit while delivering nonsensical monologs but at least, the man brings us to steamy clubs. In Pacifiction, the exoticism becomes obvious due to the location which is none other than Tahiti.
Magimel is invited to attend a cock fight, a local dance show, a surf competition, and to drink at a local “fare”1. The whole island tour, including the visit to a modernist church and local clubs where women go topless. One immediately thinks about Paul Gauguin, painting Tahiti the way he saw it in his exotic dreams rather than how it really was. Like Gauguin, Magimel’s comings and goings are those of an inebriated expatriate. When he talks to local non-actors such as Pahoa Mahagafanau, the difference in registers is flagrant and Magimel’s performance becomes just that: a performance, with no reason for being except to guide us to another corner of the island.
Exoticism is also present in Memoria (2021) by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, where Tilda Swinton interacts mostly with non-actors as an onlooker in Colombia. Like Magimel, she visits places and I believe it is not a coincidence that her character is an expatriate. Again we do not see her character but Tilda Swinton, the actress, going around various places in Colombia. This becomes even more acute when Colombia's grand scenery acts as a vacation backdrop. In all these movies, the importance of the landscape cannot be understated. Whether it’s the desert of Nevada, the Northern Sea, Colombia’s green hills, or Tahiti’s rosy beaches, they all display postcard views.
The word "exotic" is rooted in the Greek word exo ("outside"). These stars are looking at our real world from the outside as if our reality is foreign to them. They are not in it, and by extension, we feel we are not in it either.
For me, it’s more alienating to watch Pacifiction, Memoria, or Nomadland than any fantasy movie where the hero can’t find his way back into the real world. I can watch the latter knowing that I am comfortably sitting on my sofa or at a theater and will get back to reality after the show. But if the real world is in the movie and I need an actor-guide to pay it a short visit, then what will I be back to when the movie ends?
Traditional Polynesian wooden house.