For the first hour or so, Chantal Akerman’s
De l’autre
cote observes the Mexican side of the border with the US, the camera either
trained on or tracking along desolate landscapes, sometimes with the border
wall plainly in sight, or else fixedly recording the often fragmented testimony
of a series of witnesses. This portion of the film feels like a search for
something that can’t be fully articulated, perhaps because it’s so fully
defined by absence – of those who left and never came back, of a clear sense of
what the promise of America will really amount to, but also of an ability to
escape its pull. The film then switches to the American side, taking on a relatively
more conventional and diagnostic feel, its interviewees more self-righteously
certain of themselves (inevitably though, watched in an era of covid-19, the couple
who worry about disease coming in over the border and about who should get the
vaccine first in the event of limited supplies resonate a bit differently now).
With great efficiency (because the political story is essentially simpler than
the human one) it sets out the policy decisions that focused greater resources
on certain established crossing points, with the (possibly unintended but surely at
least foreseeable) effect of increasing the suffering and death in the desert;
all of this perpetrated by an economy that in large part depends on the very
people it so demonizes. The film ends by contrasting the ultimate abstraction
of migrants reduced by heat-tracking technology to blobs of white on a screen,
with a final extended story of perseverance and ultimate loss. Measured by
geographic distance covered, it’s not such a “large” film, and yet the
hindsight of subsequent years confirms the fraughtly elevated nature of its
subjects, their lives narrowly defined by immediate life experiences, and yet
charged with a symbolic and political significance that challenges us across time
and distance.
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