Not Boring Enough
Enys Men at Reflet Medicis
When looking up Enys Men (Mark Jenkins, 2022) before going to the movies on a Friday, some reviews mentioned the film’s puzzle, its pieces consisting of Cornish folklore which open up the understanding of the film to the public. Secondly, I saw it being described as a mix between Jeane Dielman (Chantal Akerman, 1975) and The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973). Without any understanding of Cornish folklore, the film to me was about boredom and its own duration. In the repetitiveness and loneliness of the protagonist’s job of monitoring a flower on an island off the coast of Cornwall, “strange things start to happen.” It seems to be time which sets these things off, first through the homogeneity of the days and secondly through the different response to one of her interactions with the island. At 96 minutes, the film is far too short to offer the creative discomfort of Jeane Dielman, and its references far too obscure to elicit any of the horror of The Wicker Man.
Although I was delightedly bored watching it, I did leave the theater thinking that the film could have been longer or shorter, but not that it had earned its length. Since watching Madame Web more than a month ago, I have been searching for this elusive feeling that sits between boredom and entertainment. A kind of stillness of the theater.
I watched Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men (2022), this past Friday in Paris’ Reflet Medicis, a theater situated in Rue Champoillon, a tiny street home to two other movie theaters: Le Champo and La Filmotheque, the three of them dating back to the 1960s, from what I could gather. The screening room downstairs is long and narrow. The theatre is shaped so that the audience sitting in the back can look up at the screen from their seats, which makes everyone in the front have to slouch in order to look up at the screen, offering a sort of active viewing experience—I am always amazed at how far back the theater goes, although I have never gone further than the third row. At Reflet Medicis, the theater and the screen seem to always be battling for a place to settle.
The perception of The Wicker Man in Enys Men is clear through its pagan and folkloric references, Jeane Dielman’s structure appears through the “boring” and repetitive nature of the protagonists work on the island. The fragmented nature of the second part of the film offers a representation of Henri Bergson’s durée. For him “it is enough that, in recalling these states, it does not set them alongside its actual state as one point along side another, but forms both the past and the present states into an organic whole, as happens when we recall the notes of a tune, melting, so to speak, into one another.” (Bergson in Time and Free Will). Through the repetition of the equal days, they soon start melting into one another, time disjoints and the editing forms a maze which traps the viewer in its unfolding. While in Jeane Dielman the routine of the character hides the true nature of the film—until it doesn’t—, Enys Men uses the routine to show the ghosts which lie there, which are seen and felt. Absence in Jeane Dielman. Presence in Enys Men.
But what happens to a film when all one can think about it is the way it represents a concept? I certainly enjoyed my experience of watching Enys Men seeing it as a miniature version of Jeane Dielman with more action, but I can’t say I have an opinion on the film. My experience of going to the movies in Paris is one that usually does not come attached with monetary value. Having a movie pass which lets me watch an unlimited amount of films a month, allows me to not focus only on the content of the film, but the experience of being in the theater. I have often times gone to the movies “just because.” But this is not to say that any film provides me with a joyful experience of being in the theater. While some films do not allow me to pay attention to the theater due to the way they immerse me in a film, some make me pay attention to the theater too much. The art of movie going is one of balance.
“What I use to distance myself from the image—that, ultimately, is what fascinates me […]” writes Roland Barthes in his essay “Leaving The Movie Theater.” “I am hypnotized by a distance; and this distance is not critical (intellectual); it is, one might say, an amorous distance […]”
It is weird to think that what keeps me coming back to the movie theater is not the promise that at some point I will see a great film, but that I will be able to reach the elsewhere, per Barthes.
Letting myself be “fascinated twice over, by the image and by its surroundings—as if I had two bodies at the same time: a narcissistic body which gazes, lost, into the engulfing mirror, and a perverse body, ready to fetishize not the image but precisely what exceeds it: the texture of the sound, the hall, the darkness, the obscure mass of other bodies, the rays of light, entering the theater, living the hall; in short, in order to distance, in order “to take off,” I complicate a “relation” by a “situation.””
Thus, I tend to praise cinema over the individual film. Barthes, again, writes that “In this darkness of the cinema […] lies the very fascination of the film (any film).” He continues, “Think of the contrary experience: on television, where films are also shown, no fascination; here darkness is erased […]” I aim for this darkness. Had I attempted to watch Enys Men at home, I would certainly not have reached the elsewhere. My television is surrounded by things, the room never dark even at night. If early cinema was faded to stay in the theater, then why do we require modern films to have the power to survive the home? I condemn movie reviews not because of their subjectivity, but instead for their lack of attention to personal experience.