Bluish

It is a long, almost infinite Sunday afternoon. At least, this is the impression I had of Errol and Sasha’s worlds of loafing around, of bumming around. With Bluish, and after Beatrix, Lilith Kraxner and Milena Czernovsky continue to explore the space around characters reduced to sheer existence, characters whose characteristic is the sheer fact of being there. A difficult and wonderful task for cinema – and probably the most appropriate self-reflexive task of cinema, which is itself a Sunday afternoon item, I would say. Let’s be straightforward: this is a task that the young Austrian filmmakers are able to interpret at an astonishingly high level, with Bressonian minimalism and Akermanian intensity. Just take the first scene of Bluish: a quiet room with a window (a definition of cinema?), whose stillness makes us attentive to sounds (an occasion to praise Benedikt Palier’s amazing sound design), and whose immobility hides a sleeping person as a thing among other things, so that her waking up will become a true event – the animation of the image and the emergence of Errol’s personality (Leonie Bramberger).

But which kind of personality is Errol’s? Her hesitancy and apparent anonymity would have us define it as a “weak personality”, something faded, as the “-ish” of bluish seems to hint at. However, it is exactly this weakness that makes her interesting. Her resistance to definition, her not playing a definite social role teaches us how a lack of personality can simply mean a strength of humanity. As the Latin word “persona” also means “mask”, her being without masks shows the beauty of her nakedness, of her being irreducibly human. From this perspective, her distraction becomes a weapon against the reductive force of physical and social functioning. I would not call her a dysfunctional character though, because she does not break the ruling functions, but rather suspends them, gently.

For the viewer, Errol’s presence is contagious: her going around – so often hors cadre –brings truth to the places and the people she meets. This truth makes of the simplest meeting an encounter, so that the film narration seems to go nowhere while at the same time tells a large number of little adventures – a duplicity that I like to read in her odd name: Errol for erring, but also for the legendary actor Errol Flynn, personification of cinematic adventures. Her life bears witness to all possible frictions regarding people and things, as if they were inevitably destined to be too big to cope with. Sasha, the second character of Bluish (Natasha Goncharova), shares with Errol the same erring and the same struggle with this unmanageable bigness of things and people, but with a more voluntaristic approach, which makes her even more odd and out of place.

Errol and Sasha are an ode to queerness, with their sensible openness to non-conformism and their attitude of constant research, including but also surpassing gender (re-)definitions. In this respect, the opening performance of Les reines prochaines and the final performance of UFO | ultra fett original perfectly express the broad range of their queerness, in a way that is able to put both humour and sensuality together. In Bluish, queerness becomes a way to look at the world, a way to sense it, which is actually the most sensitive one, where sensitivity is both acute and fragile insofar as it is not a priori channelled into prescriptive roles. Errol and Sasha’s lazing about is nothing but a way to ponder the physical weight of existence, to which the choice for the 16 mm film appears to be as natural as necessary. Lilith Kraxner and Milena Czernovsky use this specific sensitivity of queerness in order to allow the emergence of desire as the hidden protagonist of the film. In a way, the suspension of Errol and Sasha in a world that tends to relegate them to its margins as odd details creates a sort of desert of apathy from which their not-disappearing, their insisting on participating in the affairs of the world, and their rare and clumsy initiatives become a brilliant symptom of the most intense form of desire.

Now we’re probably able to understand what “bluish” could mean. The film is literally bluish, in terms of presence of the colour, but Errol and Sasha are principally bluish while resonating with the colours on the screen: they seem to be blue as things among other things in a Sunday afternoon, but out of the blue, out of this being blue, they actually shine through their desiring force, they shine bluish. In a nutshell, bluish is a queer blue, out of the blue of being blue.