The opening shot is of an empty apartment as the sun sets. There is no movement, only the sunlight changing color through the window until darkness claims the space. It's done in what appears to be real time, and stretches your patience; this movie is orienting you to a very unusual pace for film. A whispering voiceover in French invites the audience to engage their senses before we cut to the woman who owns this apartment. Khadija is an older, headscarf-wearing immigrant woman who spends her long days as a cleaning lady. She leaves her work exhausted and gets on the train. Another long take features Khadija, in close up, as she falls asleep in her seat.
Unfortunately, this means she misses her stop, and is awoken sometime later at the end of the subway's line. The buses are out of service for the night. Khadija is stranded unless she begins to walk through the cold, dark streets of Brussels. And so walk she does, and we journey with her into the night on an odyssey back home. It's not clear how well she knows the city and its various neighborhoods, but she seems relatively content to meander her way past businesses, apartments, houses, and parks. She's not in any hurry, and there are occasional moments of beauty in the way the film is photographed, 16mm, with a tendency to turn rainspots and streetlights into glorious pools of color and light.
And that's about where the beauty ended for me. Plodding through what some may call a brief 84 minutes, the film is torturous in its lack of interest. I like a good melancholy think piece when it comes along, but this one is barely tolerable. As Khadija treks through town, her few interactions with other night owls have little depth, sparse drama, and often no consequences on the streamlined plot. She meets a security guard who allows her access to an ATM to get money for a cab; her account is overdrawn; she tells him she got what she needed before continuing on her way. Are we supposed to think that she is proud? If so, why did she ask him for one of his cigarettes, but not money? Are we supposed to think that she is afraid? If so, why is he handsome and aggressively kind to her?
Other interactions supply the episodic structure of the movie after Khadija's stranding. She meets a few people and we learn a tiny bit about her. She creepily approaches a house and sees someone apparently squatting inside; another man appears and asks what she's doing. She answers that she once cleaned this house, but mentions that she hasn't seen anyone else. Is this a fascinating subversion of classism and poverty? The man asks if she is looking for work because he is unhappy with his own cleaning lady. Is this a critique of capitalist influence on sexism, trading one working woman for another without a second thought? Is it a commentary on racism and how the man indirectly proclaims himself not prejudiced against the darker-skinned Khadija (he mentions his cleaning lady is Polish) even though he's the one interrogating her at night about her activities? Could this one interaction inform the movie's larger themes?
I'd say no, because it's too muddled, too brief, and never visited again. It happens again later, when Khadija runs across her daughter, out with friends and flirting with a young man. Khadija watches from afar as they drink and sit on a cold park bench. At first, I thought the film was asking us to consider how second-generation immigrants have such different lives from their parents, and the sacrifices one generation makes for the next. But it gets weird after a while as Khadija just keeps watching; she seems to have a kind face, though she clearly doesn't know much about her own daughter's social life or interests. Maybe she's not "allowed" to, given her hard work, but then again she is taking a long damn time to get home all night and surely she'll be working again tomorrow. Does this woman ever sleep?
I saw this Belgian film at the Chicago International Film Festival, and afterward Bas Devos, the director, spoke briefly and answered some questions. He repeated that his intention in making this movie was to help make visible women like Khadija -- an older, working woman (not a mother, not a terrorist, not a mother of terrorists) -- as that demographic is so universally unseen. My problem with that is in the way the film seems determined to do the opposite thing. Sure, she's "visible" if that means she's on screen most of the movie, although even that is debatable since many shots feature the city without Khadija or show her from far off, making her way slowly along a sidewalk into obscurity. But each interaction she has with people show her to be quiet and indirect -- it's so underwritten that we don't even know if she's aloof, scared, shy, or what -- and completely inconsequential. At one point, she approaches an unconscious homeless man for whom she calls for help in one of the only "actions" she actually takes; much later in the film, she enters a hospital and asks about him before learning he died earlier that same night. The one time she did something potentially worthwhile all night ends up being for nothing, and the filmmaker thinks that helps her social visibility?
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