‘Here’ review: Souls searching for their place

Punctuation: ****

Manager: Bas Devos

translators: Stefan Gota, Liyo Gong, Cedric Luvuezo, Teodor Corban

Year: 2023

premiere: 18 October 2024

On paper, Belgian director Bas Devos’ fourth feature film can be described as follows: an immigrant storybecause it depicts two lost souls who cannot quite fit into the place they are trying to make a home. But his methods have nothing to do with those we associate with social cinema. First of all, what ‘Here’ conveys is not a coherent narrative, but a series of moments associated with an unusual logic. It’s also a movie that It is very impressive because of the richness of its images and the calmness and warmth it conveys. and for its disarming simplicity: it runs 83 minutes, uses almost no dialogue, and acts in the most precise and honest way.

The film’s two protagonists, a Romanian worker and a botanist of Chinese descent, share little screen time, but Devos manages to ensure that their scenes together exude transcendence and suggest that their previous lives were just the beginning of chance meeting. As their relationship develops, it turns into the city of ‘Here’. Brussels a living organism as complex and mysterious as its inhabitants, in a space where nature and the changing cityscape coexist in hypnotic harmony; and blur to achieve this Boundaries between what is real and what is imaginedit mixes utterly dreamlike images with the kind of visual pleasures that everyday life can offer us if we look hard enough.