Close-Up on Virgil Vernier's "Sophia Antipolis"

The two shape-shifting feature films by Virgil Vernier have made him one of the most vital new European directors of the past decade.
Ela Bittencourt

Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on MUBI. Virgil Vernier's Sophia Antipolis (2018), which is receiving an exclusive global online premiere on MUBI, is showing from June 3 – July 2, 2019 in MUBI's The New Auteurs series.

If there’s one thing we can say for sure about the forever shifting cinema of Virgil Vernier is that it’s indefinable. In his previous feature, Mercuriales (2014), Vernier showed a friendship of two fiercely independent young women, against a vivid portrait of desolate corporate streetscapes. Where some filmmakers may venture into extensive character development, or stretches of dialogue, to inveigle against the 21st century capitalist morass, Vernier instead lets urban landscape speak mostly for itself—and a myriad of social and urban-planning ills, such as the ravaging of communal feeling in most big cities, and the physical emptying out of previously robust residential areas, with the economically underprivileged pushed out further from the affluent zones. All these transformations are already a fait accompli in Vernier’s work. This is why the landscapes in his films may not immediately strike us as French—they are corporate globalized wastelands, stripped of distinct culture or soul.

Vernier’s latest feature, Sophia Antipolis, is also permeated by communal and urban alienation, with places hinting little at their past once they’ve been transformed into uniform corporate blocks and banal glass towers. The title itself refers to an actual technology park in southern France, between the cities of Nice and Cannes. In the film, the park scenes are mostly nocturnal. By night, these endless vacant lots and office spaces attract vandalism and crime: A body of a young woman of Latin descent is found scorched in a garage.

This plot element could suggest a gripping suspense drama, but Vernier isn’t one to construct a narrative that resembles any recognizable genre. Instead, his instinct seems to be to relish each small scene’s situational richness, and to marvel in the unexpected juxtapositions of cinéma-vérité storytelling and more oblique imagery. Rather than drive with characters, Vernier bounces around—first from a few very young women who show up at a plastic surgeon’s for a consultation, desperate to have breast implants, then to two middle-aged women who bond over a meeting of a spiritual sect and a confession about a young daughter who ran away; and on to a group of security guards who do self-defense sessions in spare time and volunteer as nocturnal guards in their area, which they believe to be under-protected by the police. We must then trust that these disparate narrative threads and characters—each presenting a unique dilemma of contemporary living—will eventually coalesce. Luckily, it is easy to trust Vernier. His camerawork is understated yet confident, and his reliance on striking non-professional actors and eerie, keenly observed scenes are a powerful hook.

Let’s take a sequence—easily the most memorable in the film—in which the self-elected neighborhood “angels” train and then go out on a night patrol. A young black Frenchman is among the volunteers. He joins at the urging of his friend, a security guard, but the training session, meant to prepare the guardians for such real-life threats as robbery and rape, quickly turns to something a lot more slippery. When his fellow trainees haze the young man by taping him to the ceiling with a masking tape, and then let him go, to stroll alone outdoors, with the tape still glued to his clothes and disjointedly mumbling about their insidious laughter, it isn’t at all clear just how far the line of decency has been crossed. Are his fellow-in-arms vigilant, or are they vigilantes? Where exactly does one draw the line? In a later scene, when that same young man participates in the group’s raid on a private home—most likely of an immigrant, whose mug shot is taken together with his legal papers—the threat and intimidation echo the humiliation that the young volunteer had suffered at the hands of his racist colleagues.

We do eventually piece together the puzzle of the scorched victim, when the plastic surgeon is meaningfully linked to her past, as is the young girl whose mother has been so emotionally wrought after her running away that she joined the spiritual healing group. But even then, the story still continues to be one step ahead of us; the pleasure of watching it lies in embracing its mysteries. In my favorite moment, the young black man is shown posing on a rooftop with a peacock feather in his hair, in a sunlit shot—possibly at Sophia Antipolis, though it could be elsewhere, in a more distant past. The image may not mean anything strictly speaking but it hints at exhilarating possibilities. Here is light, in a place that’s been smothered by darkness. Here is an affirmation of individuality and warmth, where most characters have been governed by the ruthless herd mentality. Here is also flirtation, delight, in place of the constant fear of trespassers, others.

This moment notwithstanding, Sophia Antipolis is conceived in a minor key. Its profound unease borders on existential malaise. In this sense, Vernier shares some affinity with the Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke, or with the apocalyptic prose of the British writer J. G. Ballard. Haneke’s The Seventh Continent (1989), Funny Games (2007), and even White Ribbon (2009) all occupy a similar psychological terrain, as does Ballard’s High-Rise (1975). Unlike Haneke, however, Vernier isn’t interested in climactic denouement, and his stories are a bit like Emily Dickinson’s famous dictum, “Tell the truth but tell it slant.” We may not get much sense of character when it comes to the film’s individual protagonists, but enough to glimpse the quintessential paradox of human relationships: Vernier’s characters are capable of deepest love—they speak of it often enough—yet their need for safety and protecting loved ones leads them to discriminate and to oppress. All this is terrifyingly human, the more terrifying the further it gets from the straightforwardly sadistic bend of Funny Games, and into the shadowy territory of moral ambiguity. Violence is always just barely under the skin for Vernier’s characters, and it creeps up on them in a flash. In Sophia Antipolis, when the volunteer patrol raids a makeshift refugee camp, at least one of them clearly acts against his better judgment. Indeed, once we convince ourselves that the world is damned and only we can save it, we move a step closer to trumping solidarity with others. Vernier’s uncompromising vision of breached social contract, and his novel, fractal storytelling make him one of the most vital European directors to have emerged in the past decade.

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