“Baan” in Thai means “home,” which Leonor Teles chose as the title for her debut feature because the film, largely shot in Lisbon but melding at times into Bangkok, is meant to address the rootlessness of globalized youth searching for some place to call “home.” It’s a good theme, unfortunately knee-capped by a woefully immature script rife with ham-fisted dialogue that would challenge even seasoned actors. Shot by Teles herself in short, sometimes impressionistic scenes whose general lack of development doesn’t help make the drab protagonist any more interesting, Baan charts the rocky relationship between a Portuguese architect and the Thai-Canadian woman she’s fallen for, weaving in issues of racism and belonging. The whole thing feels like a well-meaning but misguided first film, yet Teles’ 2016 short Batrachian’s Ballad won the Golden Bear, so she knows her way around. It’s hard to imagine where this will go following its Locarno premiere.
One of the issues is that she tries to create a liminal space between Lisbon and Bangkok, destabilizing viewers’ expectations of time and place in a manner far more ambitious than she’s able to handle. Rather than create a kind of memory palimpsest offering insight into a sense of displacement for both women, Teles melds the two cities and in so doing globalizes them too, in a negative way. In addition, she plops songs in at random, including “I Feel for You” and “Voyage Voyage,” in a manner that may be meaningful to her, but their arbitrariness as well as their placement simply leave the viewer perplexed.
L (Carolina Miragaia) is a mannish newbie at a small architectural firm who apparently just broke up with her boyfriend, or perhaps he ended things with her: there’s a close-up of them embracing where only her face is seen as she sings Banks’ “Fuck Em Only We Know.” Well, only they do know, since we don’t know much other than that things ended and she’s not confiding in her best friend. Then she meets graphic designer K (Meghna Lall), a Canadian of Thai birth just arrived in Lisbon via Singapore and London. There’s an immediate attraction between the two women, their flirtation made grandiose in an unnecessary and cheap recreation of the overpass scene in Millenium Mambo, followed by spray-painting trite slogans on a wall. Then one day K suddenly leaves and L falls apart, keying cars on the street and nearly sabotaging her job by insulting a couple of insufferable American clients who, admittedly, deserve to be ridiculed (though they’re made far too easy a target).
Baan shows Lisbon as a city of migrants whose multiracial residents (Pakistani shop owner, Far East Asian emigres, etc.) are frequently targets of abuse: how do you call a place “home” if you’re not made to feel you belong? It’s an important question to ask, and deserves considered exploration, yet the film’s superficial investment in the problem ultimately takes a back-seat to L’s crush on K, making it seem like a case of untrammeled white guilt trying to overcompensate by offering the supposed salvation of L herself as the true home. K would have been the more interesting character to delve into, but since L appears to be something of a stand-in for the director herself, she’s the one we follow, to the film’s detriment since she’s simply not interesting or sympathetic enough.
The hard digital quality of the visuals doesn’t help matters, especially at the start when the observational camera tends to keep the characters at a distance. The film’s unnecessary length and occasional slow-mo inserts, together with the haphazard use of well-known songs, give the impression that multiple programming tools were being tried out, adding to the overall sense of an undisciplined work whose potentially interesting message can’t survive the banal, poorly delivered dialogue.
Director: Leonor Teles
Screenplay: Leonor Teles, Ágata de Pinho, Francisco Mira Godinho
Cast: Carolina Miragaia, Meghna Lall, Filipa Falcao, Filipa Reis, Joao Miller Guerra, Carolina Varela, Simao Marinho, MD Saleman
Producer: Filipa Reis
Cinematography: Leonor Teles
Production designer: Sandra T.
Editing: Lívia Serpa, Sandra T.
Sound: Rafael Gonçalves Cardoso, Joana Niza Braga
Production company: Uma Pedra no Sapato (Portugal)
World sales: Totem Films
Venue: Locarno Film Festival (International competition)
In Portuguese, English
102 minutes