Sitting High episode 5: "Nomad Land"

episode.5 Nomadland."

story

Fern, who lost her longtime home in Nevada when her company went bankrupt, packs her memories of her late husband into a camper and travels around the seasonal labor scene as a "modern nomad". As she struggles to overcome the challenges of each day, her free and proud journey continues as she interacts with the nomads she encounters along the way...

For example, you board a train that arrives at a station and wait for it to depart while watching another train stop on the opposite platform. After a while, the train across the street departs ahead of you, but it is your train that starts moving. I felt an illusion similar to such an experience in this "Nomad Land.

The story follows the life of Fern, an elderly woman who travels around the U.S. in a campervan, leaving the city where even her zip code has been erased due to the closing of a factory caused by the collapse of Lehman Brothers. It is a so-called "road movie," but the sense of movement characteristic of road movies is somewhat lacking.

Wherever Fern goes, she meets "nomads" who are in the same situation. The emphasis is on Fern's farewell to these people, as she watches them depart from the place. The film has the aspect of a road movie that observes people on the move from a fixed position.

The people who are separated are reunited in various places, but they are portrayed simply as if they were neighbors who bumped into each other while taking a walk in the neighborhood. However, the distances between the places where they are reunited must be considerable.

There are many scenes in which Fern herself moves around in a car, but while the rain and wind beating against the car body and the sound of the windshield wipers moving are emphasized, the sound of the car driving is intentionally kept low. This is somewhat unrealistic, as if a legless ghost were moving, and is very symbolic of the film's characteristic blurring of the line between documentary and fiction.

Although it is a road movie, the sense of grounded localization is due in large part to the spectacular scenery found in various locations.

At a press conference at the Venice International Film Festival, Frances McDormand, who plays Fern, said that she loved the journalist's description of McDormand's face in the film as "like visiting a national park" (from "Nomadland" press release), (From the press release of "Nomadland"). In this film, the wrinkles on the mature faces of the characters and the spectacular natural scenery are equivalently illuminated by the evening sunlight.

It is a far cry from the contrasting representations of people and nature found, for example, in Terrence Malick's "Days of Heaven".

The motif of stone often appears as an extension of the topographical landscape of the American West, but if you think about it, stone, which is often thought of as an immobile object, is also a dynamic entity carried by magma and rivers, and can be superimposed on the existence of "nomads. It may be possible to overlap this with the existence of the "nomads".

While Chloe Jiao's previous film, "The Rider," depicted a dense story with ups and downs at a leisurely pace, this film is relatively flat and moves along at a brisk pace with fast editing. The number of cuts in this film is probably much larger than in the previous film.

Chloe Jiao's talent is notable in the precision of her rhythmic approach to her subjects, which at first glance may seem counterintuitive: slow and deliberate when depicting the struggles unique to young people, and fast-paced and unobtrusive when telling the stories of elderly people who are familiar with the subtleties of life.

Fern's recitation of William Shakespeare's "Sonnet No. 18," a universal statement about summer ending quickly, is one of the film's most moving scenes, but it also seems to be a poem that symbolizes the film's underlying tone.