AFI Fest Review: Violet

Film is a medium of movement and noise, sound and fury, pathos and passion.  It is film's kinetic capacity, and its bombastic potential, that make it such a massive draw to the drooling masses, seeking a bit of bloodsoaked escapism in which the screams and gunshots drown out the mundane soundscapes of everyday life.  Many filmmakers, especially the most commercial of them, fear silence and stillness; perhaps they see such qualities as regressive, or merely dangerous to capturing viewers' attention.

Bas Devos possesses no such fear.  The Belgian director's debut feature, appropriately screening as part of AFI Fest's New Auteurs series, seizes on and luxuriates in the explosive power of stillness and the endless depths of silence.  Film is a primarily visual medium, as Devos knows.  His beauitful compositions and long takes allow the imagery to do the talking, relaying narrative details and revealing emotional truths in equal, beautiful measure.  His work at times echoes Xavier Dolan, Michel Haneke (the film's opening and interstitial montages call Cache to mind), and Yasujiro Ozu.  Like the late Japenese master, Devos' camera moves to cancel the characters' motion, creating the illusion of stillness and trapping his characters in the frame, where they are vulnerable.

Such techniques suit Violet's stark subject matter.  The film opens - using secutiry camera footage - with Jesse (Cesar De Sutter) witnessing the death of his friend Jonas, who is brually attacked by a pair of teenagers.  From the onset, the film prepares us for the experience of being kept at a distance, witnessing the violence on a screen within the screen, robbed of context or sound.  It is the first of many bold acts of narrative and formal defiance by a director who is arriving with a strong, developed voice.

In De Sutter, Devos has found the perfect vessel for shattered innocence.  The angel-faced teenager is the picture of pure youth, with a visage made for close-ups, the anguish and confusion just registering, but never fully.  Jesse's favorite hobby - BMX riding with a group of friends who either shy away from Jonas's death or dive into discussion without tact - becomes a pregnant ground for symbolism.  The perpetual motion of a kid on a bike is a stark contrast to the emotional stagnancy of (not) dealing with grief and guilt, when the camera allows the movement to go unchecked.  An Escher-eqsue skate park is impossible to discern until riders appear on its varied surfaces, just as the unnavigable depths of despair are abstract until someone we know (or we ourselves) must traverse its nooks and crannies.

Always, we are voyeurs of tragedy and grief, but never of overwrought emotion or outright explosions of sadness.  We peek into rooms, witness empty chairs at empty tables, and see Jesse riding alongside a ghost, guiding Jonas's empty bike as he rides through streelight-illuminated streets, the memory of a child marking the suburban streets.  Devos and his director of photography, Nicolas Karakatsanis (who also lensed the Oscar-nominated Bullhead) dare us to find significance in each lingerging, careful shot, just as Jesse and his friends must search for meaning in a meaningless act of violence.  Only rarely does the film aim a punch squarely at our collective gut, such as a scene of cleaning up the memorial site, an unshakeable sight.

With Violet, Devos announces himself as an up-and-comer to watch, perhaps still operating in the shadows of the great directors who have come before, but still carving out his own place within that darkness.  His impressive visual rendering of interior grief and confusion is a daring riff on the familiar theme of the loss of innocence, and a stunning manipulation of what an audience expeccts to see when we look at pictures of loss.