Director: Antoine Pouilly
Writer: Antoine Pouilly
Cast: Rêvelise Rohart, Julien Judez, Mathilde Alfano
Running time: 15mins
Meadow’s Distance has put me in a difficult position. I hate Top Gear, and I don’t want to be accused of emulating the jingoistic gargoyles who used to present it by making the statement: this is the most French film I’ve ever seen. But when the film’s purposefully obtuse dialogue features the line, “If you continue along this path, you’ll come across the Ceroni’s farm. You’ll see a young horse there, who’s brown and kind”, what else is there to say?
There’s everything you need for xenophobe-bingo here. It’s a French film, largely silent, with a cast of regular-looking people (no preening Hollywood types here), some light connotations of sexuality, possible LGBTQ+ romance, and an utterly baffling script that was seemingly lifted from verbatim from a dream.
The earlier quote comes from the end of the movie’s only conversation – between a nameless woman travelling aimlessly around the French countryside, and a nameless man who is fondling a ball of wet clay in his trouser-pocket. The man, sitting alone at a bench in the middle of the woods, promptly stands and leaves; while the woman sneers disgustedly at the notion of the horse – however kind it may have been – turns her bicycle around, and heads in the opposite direction.
Eventually, she finds a footpath cutting across her bike lane – and into a dense patch of forest. Ominous as it looks, she immediately abandons her bike to explore the depths of the woodland – and eventually this sees her happen on a whole pile of moistened clay. She proceeds to fondle the mound of earthy brown material for what may be the duration of the day – the sun having perceptively shifted in the sky by the time she finally decides to prize her fingers from the cavern she has mashed them into.
Without wanting to sound prudish, it’s not a scene I’d recommend you watch over lunch.
Following this strange moment, the woman proceeds on her journey, and meets up with another woman in a bird hide, somewhere else in the forest. This is apparently where she was heading all along – and the pair hold hands (our lead character taking care to present the clean one). The film then concludes with two shots of a picturesque sun-set – the only notable piece of cinematography (aside from the clay, because admittedly it takes real craft to make something look as off-putting as that).
Amid all this, it’s difficult to make out exactly what Antoine Pouilly’s aims were here. If this is just supposed to be a vague, arty film which you bring your own interpretation to, then it doesn’t provide enough of the window-dressing required to make it watchable to an audience – be that more intense and engaging acting, or richer and better-interwoven imagery. On the other hand, if making pretty pictures was seen as a distraction, and the real intent was to say something,then whatever that something is needs to be much more overt here for the uninitiated (speaking as one of that number).
That means unfortunately for Meadow’s Disturbance, it is ripe for people to make boorish jibes about ‘pretentious, artsy French films’ in its direction. I get the feeling that there should be much more to talk about here than that – but the problem is knowing where to look for it.
Taking an admittedly-wild stab in the dark as to what this is about, I would guess that there is something in here about emergent sexuality – a fear of being seen as ‘subversive’, but of the beauty that shines forth when embracing that identity in spite of those preconceptions. But that is a conclusion drawn entirely from having seen the main character is joined in a very, very vaguely romantic union immediately after she spends the day fisting a hill made of dampened clay. Philistine that I am, I may have completely misread all that. The problem is, with nothing else to really draw me into the film, I’m left with no other options.
