A Cooler Climate – first-look review | Little White Lies

Festivals

A Cool­er Cli­mate – first-look review

11 Oct 2022

Words by Charles Bramesco

Portrait of a man in profile, against a plain background, wearing a light-coloured shirt.
Portrait of a man in profile, against a plain background, wearing a light-coloured shirt.
James Ivory rem­i­nisces about a youth­ful year spent in Afghanistan with this cozy archival documentary.

Mar­cel Proust gets a cou­ple of men­tions in A Cool­er Cli­mate, James Ivorys mem­oir-film fond­ly reflect­ing on his sal­ad days spent in Afghanistan dur­ing 1960. The 94-year-old film­mak­er recalls read­ing In Search of Lost Time while liv­ing in Kab­ul to gath­er footage for a doc­u­men­tary that nev­er came togeth­er, and notes that the doorstop­per nov­el has become some­thing of a madeleine for him­self. In his own strained yet firm voiceover, he explains that Proust’s writ­ing con­jures the sound of bray­ing live­stock, which trans­ports him right back to the river­banks he cap­tured on reels that then gath­ered cob­webs in his per­son­al col­lec­tion for decades.

It’s with a Prous­t­ian sense of wist­ful intro­spec­tion that he dusts off this archival moth­er­lode, a work of sal­vage ethnog­ra­phy redi­rect­ed to more inti­mate­ly per­son­al ends. As the open­ing scene-set­ting states, he returns to Afghanistan before the polit­i­cal tur­moil of the Tal­iban and the mujahideen – a balmy Eden with an inno­cence he can equate to his own as he search­es for a home wel­com­ing to him and his bur­geon­ing sexuality.

Accept­ing of its own minor stature at a svelte 75 min­utes helped along by Alexan­dre Desplats high-bur­nish score, the col­lec­tion of restored film­strips — at times wonky-look­ing in its dig­i­tal­ly inter­po­lat­ed smooth­ness and queasy col­or — skirts many of the pit­falls one might pre­sume of an aged white tourist rem­i­nisc­ing on their attach­ment to the Mid­dle East. Aside from a diary excerpt recount­ing his extreme dis­taste for the food and its ruin wreaked on the diges­tive sys­tem, his tone is that of humil­i­ty and grat­i­tude for a par­adise that took him in at a more direc­tion­less junc­ture of his life.

He allows the rev­e­la­to­ry yet quo­tid­i­an scenes of chores, prayer, and oth­er doings of dai­ly life to speak for them­selves, pip­ing in most­ly to artic­u­late his rela­tion­ship to them. With the har­row­ing excep­tion of one snip­pet that sees chil­dren frol­ick­ing in a swim­ming hole while toss­ing the sev­ered head of a goat like a beach ball, he focus­es on the famil­iar over the exot­ic, mar­veling at the organ­ic ease with which he fit into it.

Ivory gains a coun­ter­point and a kin­dred in the jour­ney of Babur, a 16th-cen­tu­ry Afghan ruler mak­ing not-so-oblique ref­er­ence to his male lovers in the jour­nals cir­cu­lat­ed as lit­er­a­ture today and sam­pled lib­er­al­ly in the nar­ra­tion. The intel­lec­tu­al wan­der­ing of the emper­or begins a lin­eage of queer self-actu­al­iza­tion into which Ivory ten­ta­tive­ly fits him­self, after recount­ing the dif­fi­cul­ties of his own provin­cial youth in Ore­gon, where his boy­hood wish for a dream house he could metic­u­lous­ly dec­o­rate made him an object of derision.

Por­trayed as a par­a­disi­a­cal sanc­tu­ary (if not for the unfor­giv­ing heat push­ing Ivory’s con­sti­tu­tion to its lim­it dur­ing an out­ing in a desert tent), Afghanistan gives to Ivory the same escape any trav­el­er hopes to receive from a for­eign coun­try, its anonymi­ty allow­ing him to shed his iden­ti­ty and begin the process of rein­ven­tion he’d com­plete with his tran­si­tion into fea­ture direct­ing. The loose nar­ra­tive hasti­ly arrives at a con­clu­sion with the intro­duc­tion of Ismail Mer­chant, Ivory’s life­long pro­fes­sion­al and domes­tic part­ner, their endur­ing love bring­ing a hap­py end to his way­ward placelessness.

Des­tined to be gob­bled up by blue-haired mat­inée-goers eager to share in the unadul­ter­at­ed nos­tal­gia, the mod­esty of a project that com­bines the two chief schools of ama­teur cin­e­ma — home movies and vaca­tion slideshows — works to its favor. Deter­mined­ly minor, the film excus­es itself from strin­gent anthro­pol­o­gy and endeav­ors only to show us the inte­ri­or of one man’s inward-fac­ing cri­sis. In the next cen­tu­ry, we would have blogs for this; it’s a gift that Ivory’s navel-gaz­ing takes such fre­quent­ly love­ly shape.

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