Coined by American thinker W.V. Quine, “Gavagai” is a nonsense phrase meant to convey the indeterminacy of translation. The traditional instance: A British ethnologist visits some “unique” international land, the place a speaker of the native tongue factors to a rabbit and says “gavagai.” Whereas the pure assumption can be that “gavagai” is the native phrase for “rabbit,” the truth is that “gavagai” may simply as simply imply “meals,” “pet,” “mammal,” or “we’re all vegans right here.”
Some assumptions are extra believable than others, however the reality stays that no two individuals can ever completely perceive each other, not to mention two individuals from utterly completely different backgrounds. Communication is miscommunication, and if that’s true of a single phrase, then it’s exponentially extra so of an historical play, or a contemporary adaptation of it, or — say — of a racist incident that happens to the lead actor of a contemporary adaptation of an historical play within the hours earlier than the brand new “Medea” he stars in is about to premiere on the Berlin Worldwide Movie Pageant.
So goes the premise of Ulrich Köhler’s “Gavagai,” a patchy however provocative thought train of a film that fittingly neglects to elucidate its title (therefore the preamble right here), which is all the higher to let viewers arrive at their very own interpretations. Loosely impressed by his expertise taking pictures “Sleeping Illness” (2011) in Cameroon, when the well-intentioned German director — sweating beneath the pressures of working a set in a distant nation with a neighborhood crew — wound up “reproducing the neocolonial hierarchies and behavioral patterns that we handle within the movie” (as he places it within the “Gavagai” press notes), this stilted meta-drama permits Köhler to extra intentionally hint the inexorable tensions that underpin in the present day’s globalized movie commerce.
Right here, he recasts himself as a French director named Caroline (a particularly Claire Denis-coded Nathalie Richard), who appears a bit too headstrong and oblivious to understand why her Senegalese reimagining of Euripides’ tragedy — wherein the titular child-murderer is an entitled white immigrant who’s diminished to refugee standing after her native Black husband betrays her — may probably reaffirm the identical hierarchies of privilege that it hopes to handle. Caroline is a headstrong liberal who’s doing what she will be able to to push civilization ahead in response to her understanding of what meaning, however flipping the script on racist stereotypes is probably not the simplest means of dismantling them, particularly when the method of doing so finds the director stranding her extras within the scorching Dakar solar for 10 hours at a time whereas denying them entry to the craft companies tent.
To its credit score, Köhler’s movie is far much less occupied with wallowing in such archly noticed (and self-exculpatory) ironies than it’s in articulating how troublesome they’re to keep away from in a world the place nothing is a rabbit, and every little thing is “gavagai.” Whereas there are a number of wry moments of movie-within-a-movie satire towards the beginning (Medea involves shore on the bow of a speedboat, and Caroline is horrified to see that Medea’s lifeless youngsters have been outfitted with life jackets for security causes), “Gavagai” quickly keys into all kinds of overlapping — and generally conflicting — realities concerning the strategy of exhuming an historical textual content, most of that are extra sober in tone.
For starters, Caroline tasks her frustration onto her lead actress, Maja (Maren Eggert), who she argues is just too bourgeois to play an outcast “savage” able to killing her personal children. The director is unaware that Maja — who FaceTimes her husband and daughter again residence in Berlin throughout her breaks on set — is secretly having an affair with the movie’s Jason (“Sleeping Illness” star Jean-Christophe Folly, fantastic as Nourou, a personality who’s at all times taking unsure form of his burden), which hardly rises to the crime of murder, however means that Caroline doesn’t understand her forged as clearly as she would possibly suppose.
She’s actually oblivious to the anxieties which have confronted her main man by advantage of his accepting a serious function on this splashy European manufacturing. She’s blithely unaware that Nourou’s Senegalese identification is so threatened that he can solely justify his half within the movie by insisting that it’s a masterpiece, even when the frequent clips we see of the completed product make it appear to be a hodgepodge of all of the worst concepts that Julie Taymor by no means had (jet skis can solely add a lot to a 2,500-year-old play).
Nourou’s consciousness of his personal “complicity” within the mission — the unsure diploma to which he’s swallowing his doubts concerning the film as a way to get pleasure from the advantages of being in it — is left ambiguous, however different tensions produced by his efficiency are extra evident on the floor. A high-status artist within the African metropolis the place “Medea” is shot, Nourou is pressured to imagine the function of barely tolerated outsider within the German metropolis the place the movie is slated to premiere, a downshift in privilege that results in a racist incident exterior of the Berlin lodge the place he’s staying for the competition. A hostile safety guard treats Nourou with undue suspicion, questioning his proper to enter the foyer of the Intercontinental; the actor is understandably irked by the encounter, nevertheless it’s Maja who sees it as an opportunity to carry out her identification as an excellent white woman, and maybe to overtly defend the lover she’s in any other case ashamed to maintain as a secret. It’s Maja who adopts the function of savior and insists that the safety guard be fired.
This too is predicated on an actual incident, as a bigoted staffer — possibly or possibly not on the Intercontinental — confronted Folly after the premiere of “Sleeping Illness.” That is additionally an opportunity for Köhler to redress his response to the occasion, and to look at how his reflexive transformation right into a white savior might have been extra for his personal profit than anything. Like a lot of “Gavagai,” the encounter is filmed from a take away (and on this case moreover obfuscated by a glass door), which doesn’t approximate some type of objectivity a lot because it heightens our consideration to the character of perspective.
As soon as once more, this story just isn’t being advised by means of the eyes of its sufferer, however by means of these of his director, and whereas “Gavagai” avoids any self-flagellating shows of white guilt, the movie is simply so fascinating as a result of Köhler is keenly conscious that he’s vulnerable to repeating this cycle of ethical relativism, and making the very fact of his consciousness extra essential than Folly’s expertise of prejudice. Is the act of extrapolating that have right into a feature-length movie meant to absolve Köhler of his embarrassment over the way it performed out in actual life, or — by lowering a long-time collaborator to his function in a very dehumanizing second — is the director additional confining Folly to the boundaries of his neoliberal gaze?
These can be simple questions for Köhler to handle on his personal behalf, however “Gavagai” complicates them nicely past the sure/no binary (even when the movie is weakened by its quasi-cartoonish portrait of Caroline’s blinkered privilege, which prevents her from displaying any hint of self-awareness). Each scene is relaxedly suffused with the stress between the boundaries of perspective and the empathy of storytelling, till the act of seeing turns into as problematized because the refusal to look, and the boundaries between actuality and fiction develop as blurred as these between the varied genres that “Gavagai” swirls into an unclassifiable sludge.
The final act of this film turns into a ticking clock thriller set in the course of the “Medea” premiere, by which level “Gavagai” has already refracted the dynamic between Köhler and his topic into an inescapable home of mirrors that’s much less fascinating for its reflections than it’s for the parallax of contemplating them from completely different angles. These angles could be too obtuse within the moments after they aren’t unavoidably acute, and I can’t assist however want that Köhler had jettisoned the unhelpful “Medea” flashbacks in favor of a extra explicitly self-reflexive method that elevated the “Sleeping Illness” of all of it from backstory to textual content. Nonetheless, “Gavagai” stays worthwhile as a result of it continuously provides new dimensions to the query of who this — or any — movie is “for” in a world the place even the best gestures could be misplaced in translation, and each viewer is left to reach at their very own that means.
Grade: B-
“Gavagai” premiered on the 2025 New York Movie Pageant. It’s at present searching for U.S. distribution.
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