Competing Narratives: Close-Up on Erick Zonca's "Black Tide"

_Black Tide_ embraces its genre only to subvert and enrich it, throwing us into a maelstrom of murder, alcoholism, and father(hood) issues.
jessica r felrice

Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on MUBI. Erick Zonca's Black Tide (2018) is showing January – March, 2019 on MUBI.

Black Tide

As evidenced in his previous feature films, French director Erick Zonca’s most adept skill may be providing the veneer of normalcy, obscuring the more decentering work he does as a filmmaker. This veneer allows the viewer to sink so deeply into his films that the experimental nature at work evades us until the story or the characters have swallowed our attentions whole. It is our receptivity to the nuances of these characters and story lines, so deeply felt and colored-in, that alert us to a deconstructive force at work. With ​Black Tide​, Zonca gives us a vivid field of stories to navigate, seemingly flat land, but ultimately fissuring with each accumulation of fragmented truths and perspectives.

Coming into our collective consciousness amidst the 1990s’ torrent of new filmmakers, Erick Zonca staked worldwide attention with his feature debut, ​The Dreamlife of Angels ​(1998). French cinema in the 1990s was undergoing a seminal shift: a spate of films highlighting distinct cultural/ethnic perspectives within France, handheld cameras lending a radical shift in style, and the rise of the banlieue genre. ​The Dreamlife of Angels,​ unlike the more explicitly politicized banlieue films (e.g. Mathieu Kassovitz’s​ ​La Haine,​ 1995), which are located in the housing projects of the outer Parisian suburbs (Zonca’s film​ ​takes place in Lille, which is less wealthy and of lesser stature than Paris), allows us as spectators to lose ourselves in a fast and fascinating friendship between two young working-class women. Zonca’s story focuses on peripheral figures—factory workers—and on uncovering the material that composes their daily romantic and domestic lives. Where the typical Banileue film ‘s focus would be moving peripheral figures into the spotlight, Zonca’s goal is a more formally disruptive and psychological one. In ​Dreamlife​ the materialist approach to giving voice and focus to marginalized people ultimately captures the essence of being in close emotional quarters with a suicidal, destructive individual.In his second film, ​The Little Thief ​(1999), Zonca again borrows elements from the banlieue genre, using characters’ location on the periphery of French socio-political status to follow a young Marseille punk’s path from small-time hustler/boxer into a working-class Everyman with a political awakening.

Which brings us to François, ​Black Tide’s ​protagonist: It takes a lot to love him. Detective François Visconti’s (a totally committed Vincent Cassel) pneumatic coughs and exhales proliferate the full duration of the film, accenting the dips and goofy grins of his (often drunk) mug. Appearing perpetually greasy and disheveled, he is dressed in an oversized 1990s suit that hangs off him as if indicating his return from a week on crystal meth. But Visconti’s preferred poison is liquor, and its stench colors his perspective on the stories he finds himself trying to sort. The movie begins as François reports to work. Unfriendly thugs bellow from a cell as he follows a colleague up the police station’s stairs, synced with the opening credits. Opening on a scene that straddles familial teen drama and traditional police interrogations, François confronts his own thirteen-year-old son (for which he shares custody with an estranged and obsessed upon ex-wife) for his involvement in selling drugs. And then the central crime story of the film begins; albeit one that, after viewing the film in its entirety, it seems is actually just an off-road route to a deeper portrait of our central character, François. The case commences when Solange (Sabrine Kiberlain) reports her high school son missing, having not come home the night before. Upon naming the school he attends, the police immediately identify it as one with recent conversions to Jihadism. A team is dispatched to investigate the son’s Internet searches and political ties, but Jihadism is eventually ruled out. Another instance of the film belying genre expectations: while initially showing signs of banlieue films, or some more urban hybrid, the focus moves consistently away from the diversity of cultural and political perspectives into a similarly fragmented portrait of narrative threads and personalities that echo or reaffirm the inner travails of François.

Almost immediately, a neighbor and teacher of the missing boy, Yann (an infectiously upbeat Romain Duris), begins to insert himself into the investigation. Over-friendly and ever curious, Yann succeeds in befriending François, who immediately finds this new confidante’s courtship to be the height of suspicion and the proclamation of a prime suspect. What initially appears as an insightful lead missed by the rest of the investigative team (scenes of volunteers and police scouring the woods for evidence graph François’ waywardness in visual terms; he is walking away from the search teams as he pursues Yann to engage in conversation) becomes something closer to an obsession, as brief scenes bracketing the main case showcase a very drunk François yelling at women he tries to pick up in bars, throwing things around his apartment, and alternatingly spitting at and tongue kissing photos of his ex wife.

Zonca’s frames sometimes concretize the collision of contrasting storylines. Within a single shot, the man we are soon to learn is the responsible person for the teenager’s disappearance can be seen entering a building while in the same frame the camera simultaneously captures the exit of the man who François has been obsessed with seeing as the man responsible for the film’s first half. Action stands in as a precise visual analogue to the idea of two competing stories: one a lie and one the truth. All that separates the actions is a pane of glass.

As the story of Yann and the missing boy become increasingly revealed as nothing more than a constructed narrative shell, the ancillary tensions of fatherhood and alcohol collide directly with François’ job. Toying with procedural conventions, it is revealed the film is indeed about jobs, but chiefly the single one parents have: keeping their kids alive. In line with this logic, François the overgrown kid keeps himself alive by self-medicating with booze. Black Tide's troubling exploration of a crime ultimately leaves us the viewers with a richly deep reflection on how procedure and evidence point back to the laborer as much as they do to the labor of the investigation.

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