Dimitri de Clercq's story begins with an image and sequence that's a perfect thematic encapsulation of the film to follow. An SVU has crashed in a desert, its two occupants unmoving. The passenger, a young woman, stirs and finds that the driver hasn't survived what may have been an unfortunate accident, or something more nefarious, we don't yet fully know. As she struggles to get out of the car, she climbs sideways, according to our point of view, and we realize that to film the scene, the cinematographer has affixed the camera on an axis in the rear seat facing forward so that the viewer at first assumes the car is in its normal, all 4 wheels-on-the-ground position, when in fact it has rolled over and lay on its side - disorienting, initially, as the young woman makes her way up and out (again, sideways, from our Dutch angle perspective) of the car, then increasingly disquieting as she tries to get her bearings and seek help. We try to get our bearings, too, as we are put immediately into the shoes of our protagonist's plight, as she fruitlessly attempts to make her way through an unfamiliar landscape, Morocco as it turns out. The odds begin to dim that she - and in effect, we - will make it out of this nightmare alive. The plot kicks in when a man discovers our heroine (Delfine Bafort, who, in the course of the film, convincingly has to start from scratch and thus goes from cautious to trusting to assertive) in the nick of time, and brings her to a doctor, whereupon they determine that she has suffered near-total amnesia from the car crash.
Beyond that, any more specifics are a guessing game. Characters' hands are not disclosed. Doubts enter in. Who wants exactly what from whom, are people are gaslighting one another, when will the other shoe drop, these are questions that start to slowly gnaw at what we think we are already sure of. In this respect, YOU GO TO MY HEAD sustains an art house neo-Hitchcockian aspect for the remainder of the film. While most of the movie unfolds under the relentless heat and bright whiteness of the Saharan sun, its noir elements are unmistakable.
The best stories, in particular films, don't explain, they unfold, with minimal exposition The viewer here doesn't get ahead of de Clercq's and co-scriptor Pierre Bourdy's plot. Polanski's and scriptwriter Robert Towne's CHINATOWN is but one of the most well-known examples of this (advisedly) inviolate rule of storytelling. YOU GO TO MY HEAD unfolds in much the same way. We do not know (and it would rob our enjoyment anyway of) what will happen next. De Clercq continually upends expectations. When the young woman, Kitty, as she comes to be called by her saviour Jake (Svetozar Cvetkovic, in a carefully calibrated, admirably restrained performance), inadvertently discovers information that potentially gives up the ghost of what the writers have cooked up, we feel that same sickening sense of dread found at the end of CHINATOWN because we're now so fully invested in the outcome of their relationship. It's a very deft threading of a narrative needle de Clercq has accomplished, keeping the audience's sympathies intact for both lead characters despite the unease we feel about them. That uncomfortable ambiguity felt through the entirety of the film is the very same one experienced through another European master's films whose abstract sense of queasy atmosphere is his hallmark, Michelangelo Antonioni. THE PASSENGER and ZABRISKIE POINT come to mind of course, but its better-suited double-feature companion would be Antonioni's undisputed enigmatic classic, L'AVVENTURA.
As long as we're comparing and contrasting, YOU GO TO MY HEAD can be said to comfortably take its place beside other memorable desert-set post-studio era motion pictures. I suppose the instinct to lump it with the most obvious example, Lean's LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, is inevitable, but the English director's romanticized vision of Colonel Lawrence's Arabian peninsula doesn't quite do the lethal dangers of such an unforgiving landscape justice - the vistas and sequences are far more beautifully composed in Freddie Young's breathtaking 70mm cinematography. But it's a far different type of film. Lean's images were meant to leave his audiences awestruck. Not so de Clercq's. It's abstract in the way a Hockney painting is abstract. With Hockney, you know the painting conveys a vague southern California milieu. With de Clercq's film, there's a sense of discomfiting menace and passive hostility, as if the Moroccan desert is patiently waiting for the right time to strike, and then when it does, it will come as a slow psychological uncoiling, not the adrenaline-inducing dramatics of being engulfed by quicksand in the midst of a ferocious sandstorm. In that vein, de Clercq's film is cousin to Claire Denis's BEAU TRAVAIL, in which a regiment of Legionnaires is garrisoned on the edge of a moonscape in the Horn of Africa, The remoteness and proximity of the topography is so a constant reminder of how literally close they are to mortality that it eventually warps their psyches. Kitty and Jake's isolation on the edge of the desert may bring them closer together, but it gets under our skin, unnervingly so. Major kudos are due to Stijn Grupping's cinematography. And all due respect to Vittorio Storaro, there's no need to delve into any comparisons with Bertolucci's THE SHELTERING SKY.
Symbolism abounds in YOU GO TO MY HEAD. The atonal score alludes to the distress Kitty is undergoing as she has doubts about exactly what has befallen her. Jake's modernist edge-of-the-desert home is as austere and alluring as moonlit dunes, a Corbusian wet dream. It and the outdoor pool serve as a literal oasis for Kitty as she rebounds from the crash. But the pool has cracks in the basin, is in need of repairs. Slowly the water drains away around the time that a dismaying truth is inexorably revealed. For that matter, the inquietude is not consigned to the film's final quarter hour. An unsettling sense of dread permeates the film's entirety, reaching a point of despair as it does towards the end, resulting in a most unexpected dénouement. What it finally has to say about human motivation and the lengths to which one will go to satisfy one's desires may be the film's most disturbing takeaway.
