Coined by American philosopher WV Quine, ”Gavagai“Is a nonsense word intended to convey the translation of the translation. The classic example: a British ethnologist visits an” exotic “foreign country, where a speaker for the mother tongue points to a rabbit and says” Gavagai. “While the natural assumption would be that” Gavagai “is the local word for” rabbit “, the reality is to”Gavagai“Might as easily mean” food “,” pet “,” mammal “or” we are all Vegans here.”
Some assumptions are more likely than others, but the fact remains that no two people can ever understand each other perfectly, let alone two people with completely different backgrounds. Communication is Malish communication, and if it is true for a single word, it is exponentially more of an ancient game, or a modern adaptation of it, or – say – of a racist incident that occurs for the main actor for a modern adaptation of An ancient game during the hours before the new “Medea” that he records will premiere at Berlin International Film Festival.
So goes the prerequisite for Ulrich Köhler’s “Gavagai”, a spotted but provocative thought exercise of a movie that appropriate neglects to explain its title (thus the preamble here), which is all the better to let the viewers arrive at their own interpretations. Loosely inspired by his experience of shooting “Sleeping Sickness” (2011) in Cameroon, when the well-meaning German director-sweated under the pressure to operate a set in a distant country with a local crew-depressed “reproduce the neocolonial hierarchies and behavioral patterns in which we address film“(When he expresses it in the” Gavagai “press notes), this stilled metatrama Köhler allows more consciously to trace the unwavering tensions that form the basis for today’s globalized film trade.
Here he reaches himself as a French director named Caroline (an extremely Claire Denis-Coded Nathalie Richard), who seems a little too hard and unaware of estimating why her Senegalese re-entry of Euripides tragedy where the titular child murder is a justified white immigrant who reduced to the frister who reduced to fristen who reduced to the frister who reduced to frist Caroline is a strong liberal who does what she can to drive civilization forward according to her understanding of what it means, but to reverse the script on racist stereotypes may not be the most effective way to disassemble them, especially when the process to do so the director finds her extra functions in the hot Dakes.
To his credit, Köhler’s film is much less interested in swallowing in such shen -observed (and self -sculptor) irony than to articulate how difficult they are to avoid in a world where nothing is a rabbit, and everything is “Gavagai.” While there are Several Wry Moments of Movie-Within-A-Movie Satire Toward the Start (Medea Comes To Shore On The Bow of a Speedboat, and Caroline is horrified to see that Medea’s Dead Children have been outd a wide variety of overlap – and somethingimes conflicting – realities about the process of exhuming an ancient text, most of which are more sober in tone.
To begin with, Caroline projects her frustration on her main actress, Maja (Maren Eggert), who she claims is too bourgeois to play a posted “wild” who can kill her own children. The Director Is Unaware That Maja-Who Facetimes Her Husband and Daughter Back Home In Berlin During Her Breaks on Set-Is Secretly Havel An Affair With The Film’s Jason (“Sleeping Sickness” Star Jean-Christophe Folly, Wonderful, Wondrunderg Uncertain Shape of His Burden), which Hardly Rises to the Crime of Homicide, but Suggests That Caroline does not perceive her cast as clearly as she Might Think.
She is really unaware of the concerns that have confronted her leading man by accepting an important role in this Splashy European production. She is clearly unaware that Nourou’s Senegalese identity is so threatened that he can only motivate his part in the film by insisting that it is a masterpiece, although the frequent clips we see for the finished product make it look like a Hodgepodge of all the worst ideas that Julie Taymor can never (jet.
Nourou awareness of his own “participation” in the project – the uncertain degree that he swallows his doubts about the film to enjoy the benefits of being in it – left ambiguous, but other tensions produced by his performance are clearer on the surface. A high status artist in the African city where “Medea” is shot, Nourou is forced to take the role of barely tolerated outsider in the German city where the film is planned for premiere, a downhill in the privilege leading to a racist incident outside the Berlin Hotel where he stopped for the festival. A hostile security guard treats Nourou with unnecessary suspicion and questions his right to enter the lobby in intercontinental; The actor is understandably annoyed by the meeting, but it is Maja who sees it as a chance to perform her identity as a good white lady, and perhaps to openly defend the lover she is otherwise ashamed to stay as a secret. It is Maja who assumes the Savior’s role and insists that the security guard should be shot.
This is also based on a real incident, like a large staff – perhaps or perhaps not on the intercontinental – confronted folly after the premiere of “sleeping disease.” This is also a chance for Köhler to remedy his reaction to the incident and to investigate how his reflexive transformation into a white savior may have been more for his own advantage than anything else. Like so much of “Gavagai”, the meeting is filmed from a removal (and in this case also subdued by a glass door), which does not approach any form of objectivity as much as it increases our attention to the nature of the perspective.
Again, this story is not told by the eyes of his victim, but through his director, and while “Gavagai” avoids all self -flaking shows of white debt, the film is only so interesting because Köhler is very aware that he is at risk to repeat this cycle of moral relativism and make the fact that his awareness is more important than people. Is the act of extrapolating that experience to a function length film intended to liberate Köhler of its embarrassment on how it played in real life, or to reduce a long time partner to its role in a particularly dehumanizing moment-is the director to further interrupt the damages to the limits of his neoliberal gaze?
This would be simple questions for Köhler to address on their own account, but “Gavagai” complicates them far beyond the yes/no binary (although the film is weakened by its quasi-cartoonic portrait of Caroline’s flashing privilege, which prevents her from showing any trace of self-sufficiency). Each scene is relaxed with the tension between the boundaries of the perspective and the empathy’s empathy, until he looks as problematic as the refusal to look, and the boundaries between reality and fiction grow as blurred as those between the different genres as “Gavagai” swirls into an unclassifiable sludge.
The last act in this film becomes a ticking watch -thriller set during the premiere “Medea”, at which point “Gavagai” has already broken the dynamic between Köhler and his subject to an inevitable mirrors that are less interesting for its reflections than for the parallax to consider them from different angles. These angles can be too shock at the moment when they are not inevitably acute, and I can’t help but be Köhler had jettisoned the unhelpful “Medea” bottles in favor of a more explicit self -reflexive approach that raised “sleep disease” of the whole from backstory to text. Still, “Gavagai” remains worthwhile because it is constantly adding new dimensions to the question of who this – or someone else – is “for” in a world where even the simplest gestures can be lost in the translation, and every viewer may come to their own meaning.
Rating: B-
“Gavagai” premiered at the Film Festival 2025 New York. It is currently seeking US distribution.
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