It’s the little gestures that count: the bowl you lend to a neighbour, the fire you give to a stranger, the hand that rests on another hand. Fern, the heroine, is a wanderer. Following the closure of its factory, the small town of Empire, Nevada, was deserted. People left, and Fern, a widow in her fifties, took to the road with empty pockets. From camping in a desert zone, from traveler area to car park, she survives thanks to bits of string in her little caravan. And, along the way, meet the forgotten of America, the less-than-nothing, the shipwrecked, thrown on the highways by a barbaric capitalism. In this community of air currents, ephemeral friendships are formed, fraternities of the mouise are born. It’s the song of the beggars, this film.
Floating on the fringes of the richest country in the world…
Based on Jessica Bruder’s book, Chloé Zhao’s film won three Oscars. Let’s forget them. Let’s ramble, faced with the beauty and emotion of this dive into the disunited States of the Depression: dead-end roads, precarious jobs, empty horizons. As in Chaplin’s films, the dust on the roads highlights the blind spot of the system. No social security, no unemployment benefits, no RSA. Just the beauty of places out of nowhere and the hurt smiles of brothers in the galley. Without a future, without a goal, it’s just a question of floating on the margins of the richest country in the world…
Chloé Zhao herself is landless. Born in Beijing, educated in England, emigrated to Los Angeles, she admires Wong Kar-wai and Terrence Malick. His interpreter, the wonderful Frances McDormand , was adopted by a traveling pastor and grew up on the road. For four months, the two women followed the nomads and many of them play their own role in the film. Hence a palpable authenticity. These rusty caravans, these hiccuping motorhomes, these ageless vehicles shelter people for whom one feels immediate sympathy. Marginalized in Trump’s America, they are also erased in Xi’s China where “Nomadland” has been removed from the programming, and the director’s triumph at the Oscars, censored on social networks. Poor bastards!
Thursday January 26 at 8:50 p.m. on Ciné+ Premier. American drama by Chloé Zhao (2021). With Frances McDormand, David Strathairn, Linda May. 1h48. (Available on demand on myCANAL).
