12/07/2012 - French director Franck Guérin's second feature is supported by Cineuropa's partner, the Eye on Film Label

An epidemic ravages the western world in French director Franck Guérin’s new drama, One O One [+see also:
trailer
film profile]. Abbas, a European man living in Taipei, searches relentlessly but resignedly a little white girl lost years prior. The movie, not exactly through flashbacks but rather atemporal sequences, takes us back and forth between the present and seven years before, a time when Abbas and his girlfriend lived in isolation in a deserted village in a cold, barren Alpine setting. Then, one day, Abbas found Sveta, a little girl hiding her sick mother…

One O One is not the apocalypse-heralding, race-against-time movie it may appear from this skeleton of plot. In fact, the plot cannot be our gate to apprehending the movie. It does not provide us with a logical thread to follow, and, in fact, the tighter we cling to this imaginary lifeline, the deeper we sink in incomprehension, the further we separate from the surface of the film. This is not a singular instance in cinema—countless are the films that were conceived to be emotionally apprehended, and not rare, even, those intended to be sensorially understood. But One O One does not neatly fall into either category. It is a film not intended to be in any particular way understood, but rather admired for the great number of questions it poses.

In One O One, Guérin forfeits much of the audio and expounds on the visual, and this imbalance constitutes his first and most evident vehicle for the atmosphere of dubiousness he maintains throughout the film. Without the company of information-rich dialogue, or of a conducting musical thread, the photography takes us from deserted mountainous landscapes with snowy expanses of an unadulterated white, to the brown and crowded backdrop of Taipei. The only link between these two alternating poles is a little girl’s drawing of a skyscraper resembling Taipei 101. The link is purely physical, nevertheless, for it does not explain the emotional reality of our main character, Abbas.

The movements of the camera, specifically in relation to the movements of the characters within the frame, finish perfecting the total nebulosity of the film. In certain sequences, the characters—namely, Sveta, as she playfully strolls in the woods, and Abbas, as he goes from one person to another in a crowded Taiwanese train station—move not aimlessly, but as if lost. Simultaneously, Guérin shifts his camera from side to side, up and down. In these sequences, Guérin adroitly coordinates the two elements of motion to create fluid frames—frames in constant change. If One O One does not give its audience many answers (in fact, none), it does give us much to ponder.

One O One appeared in the official selection of the Taipei Film Festival in June 2011, that of the Les Rencontres des Cinémas d’Europe festival in Aubenas in 2012, and, finally, that of Cinéfranco, the International Francophone Film Festival in Toronto this year.