Sometimes, a short movie doesn’t necessarily need to be understood, but just contemplated. We felt a similar sensation as we plunged fully into the atmosphere of the short film ‘Oranda‘. More than a filmmaker, Livan Garcia-Duquesne is a creator with a painterly sensibility, and his project is as illustrative as can be. Of course, the confrontation between the two main characters is carefully crafted to build tension, but the narrative stakes feel secondary to the rich, imagistic construct, reminiscent of an impressionist painting set against a dreamlike backdrop. The symbolism carefully hidden in the layers of this fiction, however, raises the bar of reception on the part of the audience who will certainly feel the need for a rewatch to discover as many nuances as possible of this metaphor about human’s struggle with their own destiny.
The visit of a mysterious man reveals in a woman’s soul the remnants of a past haunted by the spectre of a person she will most likely never see again. The apparently idyllic equilibrium of the house is jeopardized as everything slips into a strange logic touched as if by black magic, but which problematizes a possible existential repositioning of the woman. We are therefore talking about a short film that subtly implies a philosophical discourse that the director “translates” into the conventions of a mythical-inspired story with oriental inflections. It’s no coincidence that the delicate, fragile, almost evanescent aspect of the imagery, taken as if from Japanese prints, coexists with the slow, pensive poeticism of films like “Nostalghia” by Tarkovsky, who the director seems to claim as one of his masters. Add to this Sokurov’s grainy painterly strangeness that sustains all the spatial transitions that take us into the heart of this chimeric beauty of nature. The fluid flow of images and sensations is captured by Livan Garcia-Duquesne in a narrative of a magical realism at once mysterious and fascinating that, just like a perfume, leaves behind the traces of a haunting presence. Although its hermeticism may remain intact even after several rewatches, ‘Oranda’ is a mesmerizing cinematic experience, realized with the sureness of an engineer and the sensitivity of a poet.
For the strangeness and sensitivity with which it articulates a poetic parable about meeting one’s destiny, ‘Oranda’ was awarded with the Film of the Month distinction in the June 2024 edition of TMFF.
