Nomadland – Film Newspaper

Director Chloé Zhao has created a remarkable film about the tragedy of contemporary America. With six nominations, three of which were won, this sad road movie was on a new economic path. border The biggest winner of the 93rd Academy Awards.

Chloe Zhao's films provide a special sense of immersion. The most beautiful light shining in front of the camera – the famous Golden hour, just after sunrise or just before sunset—about the faded glory of the American landscape. Behind the camera is a screenwriter and director who is completely immersed in her surroundings before filming begins. The goal of Chow's films is to get closer to people. To reach forgotten groups on the fringes of the American landscape. In this regard, Zhao is a kindred spirit to Gianfranco Rossi. The acclaimed documentary filmmaker, who was the chief guest at IDFA last November, combines fact and fiction in a natural way to make extremely intimate encounters possible.

Zhao has already done that with her promising debut Songs my brothers taught me (2015, now available on MUBI), and even better Passenger (2017). Both films are poetic meditations on life on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Chow has now emerged as one of the most important new directors in the United States. Her first major film, the superhero saga, is supposed to hit theaters next year Eternals From Disney Marvel.

Now Chow has actually succeeded in bringing a portion of the millions of global viewers the film is expected to attract to America's new Wild West Bedouin. The film won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and was already a leading contender at the 93rd Academy Awards with six nominations. Three awards were given: Chow won in the Best Picture and Best Picture categories, and Frances McDormand (After Fargo1996 and Three billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, 2017) her third statue for her leading role as Fern, a 60-something from the small industrial town of Empire, Nevada, which was wiped off the map after the economic collapse of 2008. Quite literally: the entire zip code area ceased to exist after a few years. When Fern's husband later dies, there is nothing left to connect her to her deteriorating environment. She traded her house for a converted truck and chose a nomadic life in search of work.

Bedouin is an adaptation of Jessica Broder's 2017 non-fiction book of the same name, which shows how more and more older Americans below the poverty line are moving across the country in a truck. McDormand showed the book to Chow and he briefly adopted this nomadic lifestyle. She spent about six months in her own truck traveling across seven US states while filming the film. It offers a particularly authentic picture of life along the way, in part because the other nomads you meet are played by non-professional actors portraying versions of themselves.

Verne's story is actually a contemporary version of the story of seasonal workers who moved across the United States nearly a century ago, as sung by John Steinbeck in his story. Grapes of Wrath (1939, made into a 1940 film by John Ford) and Terrence Malex Days of heaven (1978). Both titles are frames of reference for what Chow is doing here. Bedouin It is essentially a reactionary Western film depicting new immigration flows in America. The workers' stories are practically the same, but they look a little different. Nowadays, the nomads do not work in agriculture, but on holidays they stand in crowded Amazon distribution centers to pick up orders. The footage of exhausted Amazon employees stumbling from the warehouse to their trucks in the parking lot on the freezing night is worth a movie ticket (or VoD subscription) alone. Zhao reveals an economic reality and gives her audience the space to ask critical questions about this reality.

This approach has earned Zhao some criticism in recent weeks, some of it valid. You might wonder how the film looks at the harsh economic reality, but then it emphasizes the beauty of life. Chow and McDormand not only depict Verne's precarious social situation, but also show that there is room for almost transcendent beauty along America's roads. You can criticize that, but it's more useful to see all those tensions — between poverty and contentment, between despair and wonder, between loneliness and freedom — as conflicts that the film itself grapples with as well.

Chow ultimately searches for the sense of dignity that these displaced Americans try to carry with them as they head toward the horizon. Yes, the pictures are beautiful, but they do not hide the endless depression that accompanies them. The heartbreaking encounters between Verne and other nomads desperately searching for a sense of belonging and community confirm that this is a film about living with loss and grief. Despite everything, the Bedouins are trying to find a sense of pride in the lives they live now, which is perhaps the greatest tragedy of contemporary America: having to accept that poverty will be part of your identity. McDormand and Chow try to dig deeper by showing that there's a lot going on beneath the surface of this new economic order. border. What Bedouin It shows beautifully that this layer only reveals itself if you look for it long enough and thoroughly.