Orly
With Natacha Régnier, Bruno Todeschini, Mireille Perrier.
Germany/France , 2010, 35mm, color, 84 min.
French, German and English with English subtitles.
Print source: Films Boutique
In many respects, Paris’ Orly Airport is an ideal setting for Schanelec’s fragmentary, shifting, refracted cinema. In the transience and commotion, people’s stories alternately emerge and recede. Passersby sometimes block the view, and dialogue nearly drowns in the chatter and din. Things are lost, things are found. Someone lurking in the background may be in the foreground of a later scene; the camera may lose interest in one and follow another; other threads are left dangling and unresolved. Dislocated and in between places, strangers connect and loved ones detach; both engage in close observation, surprising confessions or instant intimacy—revealing the airport as a theater of anonymity, according the freedom for such international intersections and interior revelations. Sometimes resembling the world of social media—which thrives on both alienation and connection—the airport is a petri dish of emotions and interactions while larger, darker events loom just off screen.