Téchiné: Impardonnables (Unforgivable) (2011)

Based on Philippe Dijan’s novel, Unforgivable revolves around a group of French and Italian characters living in Venice – a writer, his daughter, his granddaughter, his lover, his lover’s friend, and his lover’s friend’s son. Although Téchiné takes his cues from Dijan’s narrative, it’s suffused with his own peculiar proclivity for unusual combinations and conjunctions of characters, his ability to take family dramas and almost imperceptibly queer them. Relationships emerge incidentally, almost subliminally, making for a shifting, evanescent tone that never quite crystallises into a thriller, but is somehow all the more unsettling and memorable for that. Certainly, Téchiné situates the story within a Venetian Gothic lineage – the writer is a Gothic novelist, and a great deal of the film involves him searching for his missing daughter among the ruins of aristocratic Venetian capital – but the claustrophobic streetscapes of, say, Don’t Look Now, are effaced by Téchiné’s decision to foreground the outer suburbs and islands over the more iconographic vistas. This is a city of lagoons, rather than a city of canals, which is not to say that that the inner city doesn’t play a critical role, but that it tends to have more of a negative presence, as a glittering line on the horizon, a place people commute to across wide stretches of water. In fact, it’s hard to think of a Venetian film that so viscerally captures the vast flatness of the landscape, the way water invisibly gives way to land, making it the perfect canvas for Techine’s textural tracking-shots, which tend to flatten macro-space and open up micro-space, tracing all the minute gradations that connect apparently disparate zones and characters. Among other things, that approach segues quite naturally into surveillance footage, and surveillance itself, as the characters perpetually watch and follow each other for minute thresholds in attitudes and experience that only Téchiné’s camera can fully capture. And that makes it peculiarly suited to his method of shooting his films as a sequence of semi-discrete shorts, the peculiar elasticity with which he distends scenes and the spaces between them. Like Venice, these characters live at the brink of submergence, while somehow also surviving it, reborn each time they sink a little bit further into the film.