L'Homme-Vertige: Tales Of A City

A documentary that quietly avoids Caribbean visual clichés, director Malaury Eloi Paisley, expanding on her short Chanzy Blues, produces a compelling ground-level view of life in the Guadeloupean city Point-a-Pitre.

Expressed through pointedly chosen, consistently memorable interviews with a handful of locals, Tales Of A City finds voices in a homeless drug addict, an ageing former political activist who reminisces on dreams of revolution, and another who recites texts by writer Joël Beuze and anti-colonialist Amílcar Cabral.

Behind them, Paisley captures a place in a state of flux, where once towering buildings are torn to the ground, and the machines reducing them to rubble resemble monstrous predators. Recalling recent docs such as Andrea Luka Zimmerman’s Estate, A Reverie, or at the other end of the accommodation spectrum, Dreaming Walls, L’Homme Vertige forces you to lament changing cityscapes and the fate of residents at the mercy of local authorities and property developers, or left out completely, yet Paisely isn’t as concerned with the logistics of these processes as she is with the texture of the place, and those within it.

Collectively, the film ends up a fragmentary musing on Guadeloupan history and island life (British audiences might find their curiosity aroused by the weather-based conversations). When we run into a beach-dwelling fish-scaler who returned after a stint in Europe so he could better “help my people”, it makes it clear how personal history and politics here can be. Casting an impressionistic overview, L’Homme Vertige takes a sensitively sideways look at modern city life.