West Point

When I went to the Edinburgh International Film Festival, this was a bit of a wild card for me to go and see. I liked the still on the website and it seemed a very strange movie, having something to do with serial killings, romance, and the emigration experience.

For avoidance of confusion it's actually a French film, and the title has nothing to do with the famous American military academy. More it's to do with La Cabo da Rocha, or the most westernmost point of Europe. Surely that's a poignant image for someone emigrating from Portugal to the US (although strangely the emigration here is to France), but it's not tied into the rest of the movie so closely.

So the film is very unusual, it's got 57 minutes of footage which I think is unfortunate for the director because that means it's not a feature and probably won't get picked up by cinemas, but it doesn't really fit as a short either. I'm not sure what would possess someone to make a film that length. It's also using three different film stocks, we get some (glorious) Super-8 material, some grainy black and white 16 mm, and also some standard film stock. There was a rationale behind that, to do with separating out different time-lines and such, but it is a very unusual scheme. The black and white stuff for example is not like watching an old French New Wave film, it uses a much more modern approach to shooting.

We have a brother and a sister who can't forget the summer when their mother is killed and has her body dumped on top of a haystack in the middle of a field. Quite why the killer does this we do not know. Neither do we see the murder, or know anything about the murderer. The mother emigrated from Portugal because of the disastrous political situation there under Salazar. The children grow up but never really seem to forget the summer when mum was killed. At points in the movie we are told that the killer has killed again, and are shown pictures of naked dead women carefully draped over haystacks. There's literally no interest shown by the director in uncovering who this murderer is, and because we just see these bodies pop up all the time in static frames, and the narrator just says, "Another body, same modus operandi" and we're onto the main love story again, I was wondering if it was some elaborate metaphor about how people die many times as they grow older, have new relationships and new ideas, like snakes sloughing a skin. There's no pointer from Rebouillon in any direction, he leaves the significance seemingly up to the viewer. I mean this movie is not by any stretch a police procedural or a serial killer movie. Rebouillon could simply have left the murder of the mother as a one-off event.

The main story is really about Jeanne who is a lesbian and makes friends with a lot of feminine green-eyed feminists who love cats, if you can believe it (I'm quoting the film). The movie subverts the typically French art-house notion of two super-intellectual sensual lovers who come out with impossibly unrehearsed existential nuggets one after the other whilst in clinches or at parties. Jeanne comes out with some real doggerel at points, comparing her lover to a fine wine for example. For all that the love story, is very much a traditionally French thing, and is shown very impressionistically. At one point we see Jeanne naked on the floor on piles of random photos and soon after on children's drawings wearing only yellow plastic boots whilst talking to her lover.

Another strand of the movie Jeanne has joins a group of street dancers, I'm no connoisseur of dancing, but the stuff they were doing was like a mixture of parkour and dancing, exploring the forms of the city and each others bodies. So that was great to watch.

As I mentioned the Super-8 shots are glorious, and typically used to show nature scenes. Some of the shots filled me with ecstasy, wild flowers smudging and bleeding colour on the screen and dancing, a sun-blessed hill coming alive like a Fauvist dream. I would have loved it if the whole movie was Super-8ed really.

The reels shot with "normal" film stock seemed self-reflexive, about the making of the movie, about researching the immigrant experience, all sorts really.

It would have been absolutely fascinating if the director had been there at the end, because there were lots of questions to answer!! I take the film as being impressionistic, there really was no overarching coherency to grasp in my opinion. I just wish that there was more challenging cinema like this around. I also wish I had the DVD to play over and over so that I could try to understand a bit more and do continuous rewind on some of the super-8 stuff.

This is a testament to a family and in particular Jeanne's life that feels like a dream looking back on it now. High Art.

The French have a wonderful pedigree when it comes to detached presentation of sexuality and intimacy. In the arts. In literature. In cinema. There is a sincerity that trumps emotional expressiveness. Cool analysis. Sophistication to make the most base acts highbrow narrative. Philosophy and aesthetics trump detailed, full-blooded passion that is embraced to the limit.

Laurence Rebouillon's West Point is an intellectually challenging, visually arresting work. It starts with an unexplained death. More than one in fact. Alexandre was thirteen years old when mother was murdered. His sister Jeanne, five. Alexandre, busy filming things on a video camera, was the only person found at the scene of the crime. will "Loved ones don't die to us immediately, they remain bathed in a sort of aura." His mother's body is found naked on a bale of hay. A stark image in the middle of a wheat field. As they recall events, the fragments of what happened, we piece together with them all the intervening mystery. Colour conversations and home video. Scratchy black and white. And that stark corpse, again and again. The golden field. Voice-over: details in graphic precision of autopsy. Memories. What happened. And where did our life go?

The years between. Alexandre has become a police detective. Jeanne has her own troupe of dancers. She is in a deeply passionate affair with another woman, Louise, who is a colourist. This film film is like a poem. Like a dance. Like a collage. Just the way memory can be. Haunting. Or sweeping us up in its strange and rapturous mystery. West Point is the place where you have to let go. It is the westernmost outcrop in Portugal. In Europe. Histories of European migrations, revolutions, are woven into a tapestry of human detail. The massive, brutal, 1982 wave of emigration. 12,000 Portuguese come to France. So many clues that pull at the heartstring, without giving answers. Our film might echo some of the work of Northern Ireland installation film artist, Willie Doherty (Ghost Story). He also excavated memory. The duty to remember. The duty to forget. How do we deal with loss? Or Godard. When he speaks of Israeli and Palestinian trauma (Notre Musique). But, although finding a common thread, Godard spoke directly to the intellect. Rebouillon, to bring us intuitively to that place of understanding. Her vehicle is the gentleness of the woman's mind. The sensitivity of touch. And our protagonist Jeanne, having navigated debates and arguments with her lover. Over the basics of feminism. Of politics. It is she who will eventually nudge her brother towards an impossible truth. She realised it is not the memories but what you do with them. "Memories ruin us with melancholy when her stunningly beautiful face forgets to age."

And their mother was not the only victim. "We found another body . . ." It keeps repeating. It keeps cropping up. Ultimately doesn't everyone die anyway? Ghosts of the flesh still haunt us.

Sometimes all West Point's poetic dialogue is very suggestive – at least it can be once you work out the noir-ish ending. But beautiful, still, on the ear until you do. "We must borrow from the sun before the distant funeral." Sometimes it verges on pretentiousness. The sort that lovers use to a fault. Jeanne and Louise pledge themselves. "I'll belong to your every movement, your words of truth." But it can get over the top. As Jeanne beckons, "Kiss me with kisses from your mouth. Your love is sweeter than wine. The smell of your scent is exquisite, and your name spreads everywhere like oil." To which Louise replies: "Jeanne, your flowery prose is getting on my nerves!" But they kiss anyway. Louise can be just as florid when the mood takes her.

Deep expressions of love mirror the fact that the dead are living on in memory and won't let go easily. "If you go down there, by Mom's beach, tell her that from my tired heart the blood flows through my fingers." And will it be overdoing it to say, "Your breath is now filled with light, your lips draped in mist,"?

For lovers of this style of difficult and very French cinema, West Point is a work of rare vigour. A testament to the sort of culture Sontag might enshrine. A permanent treasure. As opposed to, say, a straightforward detective story for passive viewers (which the French also do quite well). For others, West Point will just be incomprehensible waffle accompanied by arty lesbian lust.