#lance hammer

“Ballast” attempts to Americanize the Dardenne brothers’ close-shot dramas of broken lower-class Belgian families. It presents the Mississippi Delta in winter as a landscape of depression, literally and figuratively. The sun never shines. After a man commits suicide, his twin brother, estranged wife, and pre-teen son battle and betray each other before learning to live together as a family of sorts. The characters, it should be noted, are black, and the movie may be read in part as a meditation on black fatherlessness.

It is almost completely silent. The twin brother is in a state of mute apathy, the son doesn’t know how to express his emotions, and the wife simply isn’t on screen much. The bruised landscape does most of the talking, but that isn’t much beyond a murmur of continuous gloom. The hand-held camera just relays mood; it does not really investigate. One has the sense of seeing completely banal objects and silhouettes not afresh, just uncomfortably close. There is little of visual interest besides a wolf-like dog. 

The two adults’ storylines are notably attenuated. Their relationships with the dead man remain schematic, as does the man himself, of whom we learn almost nothing. This makes their pain and recovery feel slightly contrived, both over- and under-determined. The boy’s youth, on the other hand, makes him a natural object of sympathy, and the movie adopts his spirit as its own. He doesn’t need a dramatic structure to make his adolescent confusion real--it can be felt in every single gesture. If his character too is a bit vague, that at least is the nature of youth.

160 of My Favorite Psychological Dramas:

Watching the trailer for the upcoming film Memphis, which I posted a couple of weeks ago, reminded me of a film I'd been meaning to see for a few years. Ballast never came out in the UK in any significant way. A festival screening, a tiny London run maybe. No fanfare. 

But, on Amazon the DVD was available for a fiver. So I snapped it up and last night I settled in to watch it, finally, 5 years after it was first on my radar.

And wow. Wow. Worth the wait in every sense. An utterly beautiful film. My kind of cinema. It recalls David Gordon Green's George Washington, Terrence Malick, The Wire, Debra Granik's Winter's Bone (even though that came out after this). There's also the guiding, comforting shadow of Charles Burnett. And yet, despite these touchstones it's a deliberate, individual work of great power.

The performances from the small cast are incendiary and they manage to ensure all the different themes and emotions that emerge always feel natural and human. And it's a film that covers grief, community, family, mental health, growing up, gang culture and small business ownership. Set just before the financial crisis it somehow transcends time and feels perfectly apposite for then, and now. It's beautifully composed and framed, the pace and sound design exquisite and in both its own world and the wider landscape of modern America, the mythological American Dream and indeed The West.