The films of 39-year-old Belgian director Bas Devos share three traits: a square aspect ratio, credit sequences where all cast and crew are presented on one materializing screen instead of a scroll, and an almost total lack of tension. This latter trait is especially interesting given the subject matter of the two features being released simultaneously in Japan. Both focus on immigrants, and when film buffs place Belgium movies and immigrants in the same thought, it’s usually in relation to the Dardennes brothers’ formally strict social issue body of work. But while the protagonists of the two movies under discussion likely reside at a lower level of socioeconomic comfort than the average Belgian citizen, they aren’t depicted as being subjected to the kind of indignities that typically befall immigrants in the Dardennes’ movies. 

This characteristic is particularly notable in 2019’s Ghost Tropic, which follows a Muslim cleaning woman, Khadija (Saadia Bentaïeb), who awakes in the middle of the night on the subway at the last station on the line, having slept through her stop. Since it is also the last train of the night, she is forced to walk all the way back to her apartment in the Brussels neighborhood of Molenbeek. The movie is essentially a low key odyssey, and though at one point she is questioned by a white man when she strays too close to an upscale apartment building where she used to work, her journey is anxiety-free, though it doesn’t lack for drama. At one point she discovers an unconscious homeless man on the street and calls an ambulance, which transports him to a hospital. Later, worried about the man, she sneaks into the hospital (as a non-relative, she is denied any information by the reception nurse) to check on his condition. We come to see how Khadija negotiates her transacations with others and can discern a pattern wherein she endeavors to do what’s right while remaining as aloof as possible. When she asks a building security guard to let her use a lobby ATM to get money for a taxi, she doesn’t tell him afterward that the machine did not give her any money—her account is overdrawn—because she doesn’t want him to think his kindness was for nothing. After buying some tea in a convenience store that is about to close, she is offered a ride by the clerk but only takes it so far, perhaps uncomfortable with this woman, who is nice but a bit too chatty and personable. In any case, she spies her teenage daughter hanging around a liquor store with a male companion and then informs the police that the store is selling alcohol to minors, a bit of self-serving vigilantism that may or may not get the clerk—another person of color—into trouble.

Though these incidents don’t have a thematic through-line they do feel of a piece since Devos keeps a tight grip on the somber tone through unfussy shots of empty city streets and a sound design embellished with a plaintive acoustic guitar score. This strategy lends the film an enigmatic quality that is stingy with details about Khadija’s life and mindset, a choice that may frustrate some viewers given the abrubt narrative shift in the very last scene. 

Khadija is obviously a long-time resident of Brussels, but Stefan (Stefan Gota), a construction worker from Romania, seems less settled. In fact, most of the action in Devos’s latest movie, Here, involves Stefan getting ready to go back to his native country, though whether it is only for the summer or permanently seems to be a question he hasn’t answered yet, even as the day of departure draws close. He carefully packs up his things in his small apartment and cleans out his refrigerator, making a large pot of soup with the remaining vegetables. He then delivers containers of the soup to friends and acquaintances, many of them fellow Romanians, as a kind of farewell gesture, and Devos explicates Stefan’s situations through the attendant conversations. It seems he hasn’t seen his family in a number of years. In a conversation with his sister, who manages a cafeteria, he reveals his doubts as to whether he will return to Belgium at the end of the summer, and she seems to understand though withholds her opinion. 

While waiting out a rainstorm in a Chinese restaurant, Stefan makes the acquaintance of Shuxiu (Liyo Gong), who moonlights there. We already know that Shuxiu’s main occupation is botany. She teaches at a local university and her specialty is mosses. Later, when Stefan is cutting through a huge forested park in the middle of the city to deliver another container of soup he happens upon Shuxiu again and they spend the rest of the day together collecting moss samples and talking about nothing in particular. It’s clear the two are attracted to each other, and while Devos doesn’t make a big deal out of it the suggestion is planted that Shuxiu may give him a reason to return to Brussels, and I asked myself afterwards: Did they sleep together? Again, many viewers may not appreciate Devos’s tricky narrative feints, but they impart a distinctive sense of intrigue to situations that we would normally take for granted. 

Ghost Tropic in French and Dutch. Here in French, Romanian, Mandarin and Dutch. Both now playing in Tokyo at Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya Miyashita (050-6875-5280).

Ghost Tropic and Here home page in Japanese

photos (c) Quetzalcoatl