Isolation Cinema’s Latest Addition: Close-Up on Mati Diop's “In My Room”

A look at Mati Diop's new short film, made while she quarantined in her studio apartment in Paris.
Neyat Yohannes

Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on MUBI. Mati Diop's In My Room is now exclusively showing in the MUBI library.

Mati Diop’s silhouette stands before five long, narrow windows. She raises the blinds of each one to reveal a cerulean dawn. Diop stops to open the fourth window and manages to knock down the blinds of the fifth one in the process. This scene of an otherwise torpid morning activity sets the tone for her recent short film, In My Room, which the French-Senegalese actress and director shot during the early days of quarantine. It’s the 20th installment of Miu Miu’s “Women’s Tales” series and she joins the likes of Agnès Varda, Lucrecia Martel, Miranda July and other directors, who created idiosyncratic shorts of their own for the fashion house. What’s particularly distinctive about In My Room is that it serves as a time capsule for this preternatural period of confinement.

We’ve learned by now that each passing day requires us to re-manage our already managed expectations of just how long this pandemic will keep us in isolation. When Diop set out to make In My Room, it was clear to her that she already had the perfect subject. “The only film I imagine making now, during confinement, is based on recordings of my grandmother Maji,” we watch her type in an email to Verde Visconti (Prada and Miu Miu’s longtime PR director), “...I registered [them] a few months before she passed away, while she was slowly losing her memory.”

Maji spent over 20 years confined to her Parisian apartment in the 17th Arrondissement. Diop plays the recordings that took place in her grandmother’s living room over more recent footage from days spent quarantining in her studio. Diop leans into the charming and excruciating moments that come with the territory of being near a loved one in the crushing isolation of their twilight.

“If I hadn’t married Brossart when I was 20, and there had been no war,” says Maji, “I would have also tried to be an actress.” She recalls her early days of hostessing and making friends with the actresses who worked with her to make a little extra cash when they weren’t filming. Maji saw a world in which she could happily make a living the way they did. Except the truth of the matter was that there was, in fact, a war. And she had married Brossart.

With Diop around for her final days, Maji takes the time to reflect on the life she’d lived. “I was ten years old when the war began,” she says, “We were very young and we got used to it. We didn’t find it that bad.” She remembers not having heat, or food, and seeing the dead cats that lined the icy sidewalks on her early morning walks to school. Maji is matter-of-fact in her retellings of her childhood and in her surrender to temporality. She admits to her granddaughter that it isn’t fun—the isolation, the restless final chapter. Maji finds her confinement to be especially bothersome when she thinks of her parents, who spent so many of their evenings attending concerts and getting swept up in the hustle and bustle of the music scene. “Paris is the best city in the world for music and yet we go nowhere,” she says, “...and we’re going to die. Isn’t that silly?”

Maji’s mother was a singer—dramatic soprano. Diop asks if her great grandmother would sing “La Traviata” and gasps when Maji responds with a hearty “bien sur.” Diop hums the opera with glee and in a later scene, she films herself lip syncing to it in a darkened room. She wears a black, crystal-embellished Miu Miu dress fit for a night out. Instead, she stands in her apartment and performs a portion of  “La Traviata” with an arresting fervor.

When she’s not bringing the opera to her living room, we see Diop crouch in front of her tiny fridge, bathed in a purple light, looking for a late-night snack. In another instance, she dances sensually in front of a mirror, towering in impossible scarlet peep toe heels—a rotating disco ball light illuminates the space. There are also moments where she simply stares at her phone or lounges in bed. We bear witness to the inertia of lazing about at home.

Diop also captures the interior lives of her unknowing neighbors. “In fact, I had already started a home-movie,” she says in her statement for Miu Miu, “...with filming my confined neighbors at night, in long focal length, from the window of the 24th floor of a tower based in the 13th district in Paris.” Before lockdown, she’d spent close to a year promoting her haunting Senegalese romance Atlantics, and this forced respite allowed her to be sedentary enough to begin filming her observations again. She pans from unit to unit, pausing briefly to catch glimpses of how others are biding their time. Some gather around a laptop propped on a kitchen table, others smoke a cigarette with their top-halves slumped out an open window. We see a disembodied, outstretched arm reaching for the ceiling. With fluorescent kitchen lights on at night, the endless rows of apartments look like stacked fish tanks—each inhabitant swimming in circles and waiting for a new routine.

Once, during an interview, filmmaker Chantal Akerman spoke to her own voyeuristic inclinations. She referred to her signature mundane scenes of strangers going about life as “people waiting for death.” Much like Maji quite literally awaits her fate in Diop’s short, Akerman’s final feature (she sadly took her life not long after its release), No Home Movie (2015) documents the final days she spent with her mother, Natalia, whose health was in decline. The majority of the film takes place in Natalia’s prim Brussels apartment. While there’s a lingering tinge of melancholy throughout, there’s also an exquisite allure to the way Akerman generously reveals the source of her maternal influence. A similar magnetic vulnerability permeates In My Room. Both filmmakers see voyeurism as a two-way street and offer the intimacy of their private lives just as naturally as they accentuate the humdrum goings on of neighbors and anonymous passersby. Or in the case of Akerman’s isolation classic, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (1975),it’s not just a stolen glance at a stranger. Rather, we’re strapped in for a nearly 4-hour study on the home life of a Belgian widow, who sticks to a painstakingly regimented domestic routine of cooking, cleaning, detached sex work, and efficient baths.

In My Room picks up where Akerman left off and introduces a quarantine special that treats isolation as a universal inevitability. It offers the comforting notion that while many of us might be alone and beside ourselves with the monotony of remaining at home, behind countless other panes of glass are other lonely goldfish. Whether with a light-up disco ball or a cigarette at dusk, we will continue to get by as Maji did, until she couldn’t.

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