Dinner with Blaké [Tar]
Interview with Vincent Fontano, director of Blaké [Tar]
How did you come up with the idea to make a film about two guards reinventing the world in the basement of an underground parking lot?
This film was born from my personal experience as a night watchman on Reunion Island during my college years. Unlike the two security guards in the movie, I was a bouncer at a nightclub. That’s where I encountered the loneliness, the endless nights, the useless discussions that we hold just to keep ourselves awake. It was there that I learned to live during the sleep of others or away from their holidays. That’s when I learned of the summoning of the body, and to understand what my body was saying in spite of me. It was during those nights that I realized that we had to find strategies to keep our eyes open. In that night, for the first time, I felt the gravity of my island, that of my own confinement, but fortunately my dreams were still there.
The two characters in Blaké talk about dreams and fantasies in a universe made of concrete, within which they find themselves confined. The darkness of the film and the feeling of confinement that give birth to the film’s dispositif give it a remarkable strength. What emotion did you want to instill in the viewer?
The feelings you describe are exactly the feelings that hit me while I was working as a bouncer, the ones I fought against, late in the Reunion nights. My initial desire was to share a part of these nights with the viewer, to invite them on this strange nighttime stroll where we are not sure if the body is really moving. I wanted to translate my insularity, my feeling of loneliness and confinement. I wanted to talk about this desire that carries and neutralizes. I wanted to talk about the love and dreams that are often said to be impossible.
You come from the world of theater. You can feel that in the construction of the film, whether it is the place of the actors, the framing work or the dialogue. What did you take away from this experience with film?
I like the idea that theater is the writing of a body in space. Cinema allows me a new form of writing, a new field of possibilities. It is also a new hope. I write in Creole, in a language that is dying, along with its ideas. The cinema, I hope, allows me to register this language and the bodies that wear it in time. The cinema brings me a new space where I can learn and explore. Reunionese cinema is still to be born, but it offers me spaces of doubt, research and freedom that can’t be refused.
What are your reference works?
For the cinema I had to seek out authorities, moving from theater to cinema is not an easy thing, especially when you want to rely on language. So I looked for works that had traveled this path before me, works that for me seemed authoritative. I’m thinking of the following films: The Seventh Seal by Bergman, Hiroshima, My Love by Alain Resnais, Harakiri by Masaki Kobayashi, L’enfer by Clouzot, In the Mood for Love by Wong Kar-waï and the work of Bernard Marie Koltes.
Would you say that the short film format has given you any particular freedom?
The short format brought me a rigorous form of writing, almost the obligation to stay on track with one’s ideas and ambition and not spill over or indulge in digression. What the short format has also given me is a certain freedom of experimentation. For me, the short format is really a laboratory research space.
