Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on MUBI. Guillaume Nicloux's To the Ends of the World is showing January and February, 2020 in the series From France with Love.
A man, center-frame, despondent and immobile, sits on a bench, his head hanging heavy on his chest. Behind him, a foggy background reveals lightly-dressed soldiers trodding the ground in a casual manner, their movement slowed down to strolling. When Robert Tassen (a gritty Gaspard Ulliel) finally aligns his gaze with the spectator, even framed in long shot, his eyes are piercing, brimming with rage. Guillaume Nicloux’s fourteenth feature, To the Ends of the World, is a febrile film set in the time preceding the First Indochina War and, at once, a meditation on grief and ire, the personal and social overlapping in genesis of a war trauma which turns out to be a festering, often crippling wound.
The Latin word “finis” birthed both meanings of “end” and “limit,” denoting finitude and restricted latitude—in other words, the contours of existence which define humankind and its civilization. An avid interpreter of existential freedom within borders and limits, the French writer-director Guillaume Nicloux has returned to this theme time and time again in his body of work across comedy and drama. He investigates various cases of imprisonment—be it a convent as seen in The Nun (2013), a house in The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq (2015), California’s desert valley in Valley of Love (2015), or a therapy center such as in his latest, Thalasso (2019)—their geographical dimensions compressing inwards to facilitate their protagonists’ psychological introspection. The original title of his 2018 war film, To the Ends of the World, “Les confins du monde,” encapsulates that linguistic double-bind which sits at the center of Nicloux’s character study. It does so in an atmospheric way at first, then, by trading its initial eeriness with visceral representations of war killings, seizes the spectator’s affect into a tight clutch.
The jungles of French Indochina are captured verdant and heavily humid, as if sweat, not water trickles down the cool greens at dusk and dawn. In its cool color palette, David Ungaro’s crisp cinematography stretched into widescreen format resists a beautification of the landscape but allows both grey daylight and blinding darkness to engulf, and leaves and waterfalls alike with the same asphyxiating grip. Largely comprised of exterior shots on location in Vietnam, the camerawork sustains nevertheless a claustrophobic feel throughout, men mingled with trees, camouflaged and arranged in strict rows, traversing a terrain that willfully resists foreign presence. Foreign indeed, since as a French colony at the time, Indochina was aflame due to a rural insurgency that appeared at the end of World War II.
To the Ends of the World is a war film of inner struggle and single killings, rather than one of organized, nationalistic combat. Its narrative proposes an elliptical chronology of 1945 events, following the Japanese coup d'état, known as “Meigo Sakusen” (Operation Bright Moon), which provoked subsequent independent surges. Captivated by a historical event that falls between the cracks of grand narratives such as the First Indochina War and the Vietnam War, Nicloux sought advice from famed director and cinematographer Raoul Coutard (collaborator of Godard, Truffaut, and the earliest films of Nicloux himself), who was personally acquainted with soldiers then and there. Resounding in individual experience, the gravitational pull of To the Ends of the World is grounded in its protagonist, Tassen. Ulliel’s performance is simmering with both ineffable grief and the romantic ideal of Weltschmertz (“world’s pain” or “world-weariness”). Being everything but stoic, Tassen’s character is weighed down by vendetta, as his family was gruesomely murdered by Ho Chi Minh’s lieutenant Vo Binh Yen, whom we never get to see. The narrative is at once propelled by the protagonist’s sour rage, as the film’s gesture becomes apparent: swapping the common war film trope of political demonization of the enemy for personal revenge, Nicloux is more fascinated by the repercussions and latent psychological traumas that render historical contexts humane. In the invigorating aftermath of the twentieth century, war seems, paradoxically, concomitant with construction—of man, of era, of values not only an epicenter of destruction.
Ambivalent tensions also encompass the garrison, as Tassen joins the forces to fulfill his own vendetta, yet a structuring balance can be found in two characters that seem to arrest his impulses in contrasting manners. On the one hand, the civil writer Saintonge (Gérard Depardieu) is a friend and confidant that disseminates wisdom in sermonic conversation and St. Augustine’s “Confessions,” and on the other, the alluring Maï (Lang Khê Tran), a prostitute who offers physical solace and tacit understanding that chime to the protagonist’s PTSD. In a way, both of them treat pain differently, representing the search for a consolation of philosophy and art (Saintonge), and the yearning for human bonds (Maï). Avoiding the dangers of othering of a native woman in a striking, ethically complex figure as Maï, her salubrious tenderness testifies as the only possible salvation for the protagonist’s tempestuous mind. By the film’s end, the story of Robert Tassen will be told in the writer’s words—what becomes of people, if not micro histories? And how can that be less valuable than a bigger narrative? Nicloux, it seems, is after the same raison d'être.
As much as the film’s grammar employs long takes to convey accumulating tensions and hesitation in a world that cannot be strictly black or white (such as the opening and closing sequences), rapid cuts punctuate the elliptic narrative to a shocking effect. Cuts to horrific images of corpses, on-screen killings, dismembered bodies, and bloody viscera, tuned to a haunting score (or deafening silences), all elicit affective spectatorial responses in consecutive jolts, while the lengthier shots ground the audience back into a nightmarish world that seems at its end. Morally as well as historically, apocalyptic undertones are, in such a way, edited into the fabric of the film. The dying body, the mutilated body, the cadaver—carnal aesthetics here should not be mistaken for a mere symbol. Rather, they are the human emptied out of any meaning, emanating soreness and annihilation. Without being a straightforward nihilistic take, this attention to the rotting body is a call to rethink the war as wiping out of any established meanings, including that of “what it means to be human.” The feeling of agonizing loss stings and wounds the spectator, even more readily through repulsive images of human decay, as one might dare to imagine history’s horrors as open wounds that bleed and contaminate outside traditional confines of time and space.