MIFF 2024 Film Review - Us and the Night
Images courtesy of Common State.
Before my screening of Us and the Night, director Audrey Lam, who was in attendance, gave a brief introduction to the film. Through her spirited expression, she compared the setting of a cinema to a library as a meeting place of shared observation among peers, and alluded to notions of how geometry frames our perception in such places. I immediately got the relatable sense that Lam could not stop applying the framework of a library to her life - and the film is all the more passionately intriguing for it.
Ostensibly Us and the Night isn’t about much. Shot over a period of ten years, the film is a loose experimental narrative about the interactions between two women in a library; Umi (Umi Ishihara), a patron, and Xiao (Xiao Deng), a librarian. Umi–a friend of Lam and also a filmmaker–physically revels in its geometry, diving and dancing through open shelves, regarding the grid layout of the library as a maze of discovery, facilitated by Lam’s simultaneous carefree and careful approach to cinematography. Framed through the unique geometry of the library–beige walls, ocean blue carpet, tall, endless shelves of books–it exhibits this controlled sensibility to its aimlessness that defines Lam’s style. Shot on gorgeous 16mm, a format Lam stated she prefers over all else, the now-expensive format of film necessitated detailed planning, choreography, staging and blocking. This control that unearths a romanticism of structure, as well as one that adapts to the long production timeline of the film, like the malleable form of the motion-picture artform. Umi and Xiao’s idiosyncratic relationship is similarly defined by the documented knowledge intrinsic to a library. The film is largely narratively framed through lengthy monologues performed by Umi, ruminating and reflecting on how much the contents of the books surrounding them–and the physicality of the books themselves–convey the messiest of innermost thoughts and feelings. Felt in the physical 16mm fabric of the film itself, an abstract yet tactile form of filmic evocation, this often aimless form of narrative expression works wonders in conveying Lam’s own feelings. It’s an approach that could potentially be annoying if done by someone with no conviction or only surface-level adoration of these concepts, but Lam’s filmic expression is thankfully deeply and genuinely earnest, a fact gathered from both the film itself and Lam’s infectious enthusiasm at the screening.
The library, which appears architecturally unchanged since the 1970s, is an intensely entrancing location for the film. The film was shot at University of Queensland Library, where Lam used to work twenty years ago. As such the film is inherently imbued with a heavy sense of nostalgia, and the architecturally dated and fluorescently-lit library seems to wear on its sleeve evidence of being out of time. Self-checkouts exist alongside CD players and new medical textbooks exist alongside old medical textbooks. The film seemingly yearns for an age of a freer library experience, one not so much bogged down in underfunding and anti–intellectualism but rather as much an beautifully banal academic paradise as it is the much-desired third place we yearn for. Despite this, Lam stated in the post-film Q&A that she does not wrestle with nostalgia much, and merely uses its iconography as a foundation for further emotional and filmic exploration. This enlightened me quite substantially on the film’s ethos, which is ostensibly bittersweet but in many ways is quite uplifting. Throughout the film, the lonely library is typically only home to Umi and Xiao. This was not accomplished with the use of permit and closing off the library–Lam stated that the library was open all the time, and there was rarely anyone inside after hours. Indeed, towards the end of the film the physical space of the library opens up somewhat via the magic of film editing; other people are shown, and the large windows on the side of the library are revealed, offering a glimpse into the outside world. Like the mere existence of the film itself, Lam opens up Umi and Xiao’s idiosyncratic method of library expression to the world whilst situating the two of them within the physical world that the knowledge embedded in the library reflects and transcribes.
If it appears my thoughts on this are quite scatterbrain and vague, it’s because they are. I relate strongly to Lam’s sentiments around the innate need to reflect on relationships and self-discovery through the framework of a tactile and concrete exterior structure. Lam’s expression of these ideals is positively informed by its ten year off-and-on again shooting schedule, where it feels as though ideas and images have apparated themselves to her throughout her life, resulting in a film that is just as much reliant on its conceptual stage as to its capacity for perpetual transformative identity. Within the grids of the library shelves contain an ever-rotating documentation of knowledge and love, or knowledge as love itself. I don’t know if I will ever get to watch Us and the Night again given its unique formatting and distribution, but it’s quite radically put my love of film into perspective.
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Us and the Night screened as part of the Melbourne International Film Festival, running in cinemas and online August 8th-25th.
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