NEITHER HEAVEN NOR EARTH (Ni le ciel ni la terre)
Film Movement
Reviewed by: Harvey Karten, Shockya
Grade: B-
Director: Clément Cogitore
Written by: Clément Cogitore, Thomas Bidegain
Cast: Jérémie Renier, Kevin Azais, Swann Arlaud, Marc Robert, Finnegan Oldfield, Clement Bresson, Sam Mirhosseini
Screened at: Review 2, NYC, 7/26/16
Opens: August 5, 2016
Imagine yourself a Parisian, dining occasionally at restaurants like Fromagerie Danard, Cezembre and Il Etait un Square. You stop later at an espresso bar and watch the fashionably dressed crowds go by. Then you’re thrust into what could be called only the diametrical opposite of rich, urban, Western Europe, not just into Afghanistan, where at least you can find some understandable signposts in Kabul, but into the most godforsaken area of the Central Asian country. You’re a soldier in a small unit sent for some not easily explained reason into the most remote area of Afghanistan, a no-man’s land in the country’s East near the Pakistan border. And you’re weighed down by heavy guns which you carry when a threat arises and have meetings with some local villagers to assure them that the French troops are there not for colonialist reasons but to keep the village safe from Taliban. There’s more: you have a confrontation with the enemy, people whose belief system is in your mind antipodal, the complete renunciation of materialism with an embrace of religious fanaticism, a shock to your upbringing in a secularized society.
In one scene against the barren, rocky landscape, you find yourself within a few feet of these Taliban, also armed, and yet you don’t shoot at each other. That scene that might resonate with viewers who have read about a Christmas eve celebration in 1914 during World War One between French and Germans, who later go back to their trenches to fight one another. In “Neither Heaven nor Earth” there is a mutual problem that requires working together. When some of your French soldiers go missing, you think they may be hostages of the enemy. But it turns out that the Taliban think that you are holding some of their men as hostages. You agree to visit each other’s fortifications, you wonder why even your German Shepherd has gone missing, and begin to suspect that something mystical, supernatural, something Twilight-Zone-like is going on. A film that begins as a war drama, then turns into a thriller, and winds up like “The Blair Witch Project” shows a director Clément Cogitore making dramatic points with the help of co-scripter Thom Bidegain, one which (he hopes) will have the audience on seats’ edge wondering what’s going on.
The conclusion is not what you might expect, but you get to watch a movie that recalls “Beau Travail,” Clair Denis’s year 2000 film about a French Foreign Legion division in the Gulf of Djibouti in which some tensions emerge from the relationship of the commanding officer and a soldier he favors. In the case of “Neither Heaven nor Earth,” a small contingent of French soldiers under the command of Capitaine Antarés (Jérémie Renier) spend the leisure days when not holding a weekly meeting with villagers lifting weights, communicating with the folks back home as in the case of William Denis (Kévin Azaïs) who can’t wait to leave in order to see his new baby and who gets a satellite call from his wife. When conferences are held between two people from different worlds, one of the French soldiers translates (from Farsi, but why so? Is it because the movie is filmed by Sylvain Verdet in Morocco where the non-professional actors speak no Dari, and if so, why an Iranian language)?
There are many things to question here, and perhaps director Cogitore is crossing too many genres, but one might wonder whether Cogitore is not so much interested in resolving the problem of the missing men but creating in us an atmosphere of a section of the world that could have been filmed on Mars. For example, there is a Sufi ceremony toward the conclusion. The music ranges from suspenseful to full-scale techno involving a wild solo dance by one Frenchman. Night vision goggles show people as though abstractions, as Everyman types.
One might guess that you don’t ask “What’s the moral of all this?” because some literature and some films do not have morals. They exist, they create impressions for the viewers, they make us happy to be able to go to Paris when we wish and to dine at Fromagerie Danard instead of consuming soldier meal packs. One thing is clear in a movie that’s not too pellucid. This is not yet another entry into the tired list of Afghanistan-Pakistan war creations and it will not necessarily excite lovers of sci-fi, horror, or even suspense—particularly since the director may not even be interested in solving the mystery of the disappearing men. You probably will not find it in commercial movie theaters or outside major urban areas and college towns. If you crave films that are “different,” this is for you. Otherwise, perhaps not.
Unrated. 103 minutes. © Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online
Story – C+
Acting – B
Technical – B+
Overall – B-
