Further And Further Away

Six chickens weigh only five kilos. It won't even cover the trip. The judging scales fit somehow into the frame of the matching scooter. Construction jobs are growing like mushrooms and Phnom Penh beckons. Leaving behind rice country, painted boats, the flat horizon. They've left the old village, brother and sister. They are going to the city. They didn't follow them here, the ancestors. They may not follow them there.

"if you don't want to go I'll go alone", and there is their story. Bopha Oul, Phanny Loem, each of she and he create in performances made of stillnesses and silences something that succeeds. The water surges, the force of water whose energy has doubly displaced them. Water from above, the rattle of thunder. Water from below, perhaps from the stroke of a pen.

Under a sky red with dawn the long-tailed two-stroke rattles and gurgles. The boat drifts under the slender silhouettes of the trees, the grey and amber clouds sliced through by shadow black stands of bark. By the tomb her hands, her eyes are wet. How can anyone live somewhere so narrow? How can anyone leave somewhere so still?

Water on toes, water in cracks, water not around hulls, water now around homes. Clouds pillar towards the heavens like temples, beneath them memories kept colourful in near funerary jars.

Polen Ly's film is meditative, melancholy. Under those open skies shadows on faces give soft edge to the set of jaw, the blink of eye. The skirl of silent water and the crackle of burning brush. Journeys forced and unforced, memories hidden and unbidden. Within these landscapes figures small but never lost, and beyond those horizons the implication of the city. Never seen, the phone screens that bring laughter and lodgings are turned away from us. Instead reactions, those sibling faces, these new preparations.

From the trees the monkeys watch in silent judgement, there is no evil here to speak of but there is still a quietness, a stillness. To look is to know, to hear in catch of breath is to know. The birds cry with no other audience. The incense burns with no other audience. The smoke rises past the drying bark of dead trees with no other audience. To be alone is one thing, to be alone in company another.

Not just directing but lensing, Ly's camera finds detail in crack and bubble, in reflection and stillness. Vincent Villa's sound means we can hear the water even when we cannot see it, feel it when we can do both. The rock of boat to shallow shore and footstep, the pitter-patter of precipitation from shower, from bucket. The tactility of fabric in its ragged slide across pottery, under fingers, over bamboo. All is feeling, in the end, not just from sense of place but of this place and its displacements. The walls might have gaps but the doors are greater barriers, on thresholds waiting and in empty rooms it is meaning that gives us map. Water gives way to grass, the trees give no ground to sky. In these places of beauty and plenty a mustard yellow sweater speaks of a transplantation, in hesitant ascent a form of resistance to the same. This is beautifully composed, constructed, and all the more powerful for it.