Arancia Bruciata

by Ella C Bernard

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Arancia Bruciata

a film by Clémentine Roy

watch trailer here

Arancia Bruciata is a particular film and an important one. Arancia Bruciata is a celebration of the non-confrontational aspects of lesbian life and subculture – a contemporary portrait of lives lived in non-explicit resistance yet in strength, bonding, and friendship – beyond the screen and the story. Arancia Bruciata gives a glimpse of those subversive lives and people that we do not see at the forefront, in the spotlight, or on our most popular social media feeds.

In long and slow camera shots we follow the protagonist Marta through different weathers – maybe seasons, cities, and landscapes.

Speech is rare in this film, yet essential, as the main dialogue that we hear is not seen, but comes from off camera in the form of a female voice requesting divinations from Marta –who appears to be able to read the weather and its cosmological impact on given life events of the person sending voice messages.

Not only the weather, also the birds, how they fly and behave is meaningful and holds secrets. We see Marta and another protagonist – standing in knee deep water – while Marta is sharing their knowledge on divination and birds. While the backdrop – the whole frame is divided in 3 stripes – water, land and sky makes me think of painting. Clémentine Roys camera turns the landscape almost abstract. We are blown through thunderstorm skies, rain, burning sunlight – rest - as Marta does - in the shadow. There are layers of meaning and formality in this film virtuously and subtly interwoven – that make the film despite its length and lack of action – intriguing. The framing turns the landscape into abstraction and the blues, and greens and grays become stripes of colour that prolong beyond the frame of the screen. We wonder what is outside of it – who is this mysterious voice – requesting predictions.

We wonder – what is the plot – what is this film about? Is it a queer film, are we gonna see anything dramatic – a climax?

Maybe the closest to a climax is the scene when Marta is calling for Kafka – their raven.

He left with the wind – change of season. The emotions in the film escape our reading – the tone is calm – undramatic, relaxed slightly joyful – maybe melancholic – the expressions on the protagonists faces don’t tell us much – neither do their conversations – what we're left with is a visual and sonoric journey that triggers the imagination. A film that is very uncinematic as we're not given a story – we’re given hints – loose ends – a strong notion of absence – nature meeting human, a meeting that is so abstracted and yet banal in its interactions that we wonder what it is about? There is a void opening that creates desire – a void that starts resonating in us – to observe more closely what is around us.

This film expands beyond its frame on the formal, stylistic, and contextual level. We cannot grasp or identify an end or a beginning – we are thrown into abstract images. Goats jumping into water – the element of our subconscious emotions. Yet they are pixelated – all of a sudden the camera is not clear – big pixels are dancing on the tips of the splashing water – again I am thinking of painting – not of a cinematic language – the editing is slow and we take a removed position as observers - the planes are from afar and we see the bigger picture while we are listening to nature or to divinations over the phone.

At two points Roy becomes explicitly poetic by tracing the flight of the birds edited in coloured lines – drawing their flight into the sky – in other moments the director chooses to film natural still lives, a sock, flowers, framed yet again as painterly still lives.

Despite these two decisions – the still life and the sky drawings – which break the film in a way that risks tipping the film into shallow water.

Arancia Bruciata is a strong, slow experiment that rethinks the medium itself. It is not a classical slow-cinema film. The film's fascinating and captivating quality is its reach beyond – we are not “given” a story – we are observing reality, its secrets, its hidden traces that go beyond the eye, the ear – we are invited to imagine – to perceive and observe closely and differently. Therefore Arancia Bruciata is a strong and unusual invitation of a filmmaker to fill the gaps and make our own conclusions – reflect on what goes beyond what we are seeing and hearing and what is absent, unsaid, and yet present as much as the past. A highly contemporary, queer lesbian spiritual and important 72 min of meditation on the complexity of life.

Ella C Bernard

is a German sculptor with a background in science and one of the founders of Unqualified Comments