9 Fingers (FJ Ossang, 2017) (Patreon)

Apart from a couple of very stylish short films, this is my first engagement with "punk" filmmaker FJ Ossang. Granted, this is his most recent film, and I have not seen the work on which the director built his reputation. (Based on my experience with 9 Fingers, I certainly intend to.) But the "punk" appellation seems all wrong. He's a Goth, if anything, relying on thick, pulsating slabs of monochrome imagery to create dense, swirling atmospheres of menace. While 9 Fingers has the surface appearance of Philippe Garrel more than any other contemporary filmmaker, Ossang partakes of none of Garrel's melancholia or nostalgia. This is chromium cinema that combines the maneuvers of film noir with the nouvelle vague to create something that sits on the shelf alongside Nick Cave and Trent Reznor.

I joked on Twitter that this film looked as though "Ossang visited Alphaville and stayed to set up an office." Whereas Garrel, again, has left part of his heart in May '68, Ossang is a postmodern creature of temperament. His is a noir that is filtered through the Godard / Truffaut reinvention of it, then sifted again through the sieve of cool neo-gothic posturing. 9 Fingers is less of a film than a concept album, with coherent, fully satisfying set pieces that do not really coalesce into a fully functioning narrative, at least not in the conventional sense. Although we never meet the uber-badass who gives the film its title, he rules by absence. This is a film that is determined by what is missing.

Magloire (Paul Hamy) is introduced running from authorities on a train platform. Given a wad of cash from a dying man, he is soon captured by a band of criminals decked out in retro-futuristic haircuts, shades, and leather outfits. He gradually transitions from being their prisoner to being a new recruit. A heist goes wrong, forcing them to leave the country on a cargo ship with a shady captain (Diogo Dória), under the advice of their apparent leader, Ferrante (Pascal Greggory), who looks uncannily like an older version of Magloire.

This is as close to a linear chain of events as I can derive from 9 Fingers, although plenty of incidents and interactions happen along with way. Magloire is the closest thing Ossang offers us to a point of identification, and it is noteworthy that, more often than not, he is confused as to what is going on around him. Other characters frequently shove him along for no apparent reason, just to make him stumble in his forward progress. This seems to me to be an analogue for our viewing experience. We are simply supposed to encounter the many bumps in the road with good humor and befuddlement, but a will to continue.

Not for nothing is Hamy probably most recognizable to cinemagoers from his role as the hunky researcher in João Pedro Rodrigues' The Ornithologist. There, as in 9 Fingers, Hamy played an observer who quickly got in over his head. Magloire's closest confidante in 9 Fingers, the suggestively named Kurtz, is likewise played by Damien Bonnard, himself best known for his role as the hapless sexual adventurer in Alain Guiraudie's Staying Vertical. This should be seen as both a promise and a warning, in terms of what kind of filmmaking Ossang is engaged in: poetic, elliptical, as concerned with sensuous surfaces as with "meaning."

And, like Rodrigues and Guiraudie, Ossang has a sly sense of humor. Toward the end of the film, Magloire has had enough and, perhaps speaking for the viewer, demands of Kurtz, "could you stop being so enigmatic?"