Everything and nothing just happens in Jan Zabeil's first feature "The River used to be a Man". We enter well into the story (a young European on the road somewhere in Africa), but questions of what is going on quickly become secondary as the viewer gets drawn into the stunning and surreally elemental cinematography of fire and water (by DOP Jakub Bejnarowicz). Through these images and the river, on which the young man hires an old native man to take him, we enter into a maelstrom of undiscovered emotions. The audience (just like the protagonist) teeters between making no sense of it one minute and feeling a sense the next.The young white man's loss on this trip, on many levels, becomes our own disorientation. He suddenly finds himself without guide, protector, father, god, and we are along for the journey. "I have to get away from here," the German traveler says, panic-stricken and nervous, half into the film, contrasting the old man's calm, comforting, nearly hypnotic all-will-be-well "You're here now" when they set out together.
In one of the few dialogue scenes of the largely non-verbal film, the young tourist (well-known German actor Alexander Fehling, who co-created the film, on a lone, existential tour de force) and the old native connect. In a comic misunderstanding, the guide asks what the young man does. He answers "I am an actor". "Doctor?" the old man checks back --acting as a profession being non-existent in his world (or maybe simply irrelevant). The old African, talking about the animal world surrounding them, starts to mimic what an elephant sounds like. The young man plays along and laughs. They have come full circle, both as actors, and as men.
Who, what, and when remain all the wrong questions here. The film doesn't explain itself (or much of anything else). Perhaps it is the question of "how" that we're left with. How to live left to your own devices. How to communicate and connect without language. How to function outside of one's world, one's culture, one's belief system.
The Western view of Africa is en vogue in the German art world right now (catch Berlin playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig's biting Toronto commission for "Another Africa" at Canadian Stage next month), with Africa at times being (ab)used as a foil. But here the view is gracefully understated and unpretentious. Like canoes on the river, the characters come together for a moment, drift apart, lose and find each other. If not each other, then perhaps parts of themselves.
Catch the last screenings of "The River used to be a Man" at TIFF on 12 and 18 September, and join our Goethe Director's Talk with Jan Zabeil and Alexander Fehling this Tuesday. www.goethe.de/toronto
by Jutta Brendemühl, Goethe-Institut Toronto
