These Encounters of Theirs (2006)
There is a version of cinema that asks you to slow down, to breathe, to let images and language wash over you without the usual apparatus of plot or performance. I understand that. I have even enjoyed it. But there is another version, rarer and less forgiving, that asks all of that and then simply gives you nothing to hold onto in return. These Encounters of Theirs, the final film Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub made together, is that second version, and after an hour in its company I was ready to wave the white flag.
I want to be fair. I have genuinely tried with this pair. I have put in the effort, met them with goodwill, sat forward rather than back. I reviewed Sicily! (1999) and found it puzzling but not entirely without interest. I gave A Visit to the Louvre (2004) every chance and found a rich subject squandered. But this, their final collaboration, is where what remained of my patience packed its bags and left without so much as a note on the kitchen table.
The premise, such as it is: ten non-professional actors are positioned around the Italian countryside and they read, aloud, passages of philosophical dialogue drawn from Cesare Pavese. They do not perform them. They read them. The distinction matters enormously, because a performance carries you somewhere, even a bad one, whereas a reading just sits there, in the air, waiting for you to do all the work yourself. The delivery is flat, often halting. The text is dense and arid. The people speaking it look less like cast members than like locals who wandered onto a hillside, were handed some pages, and thought, well, why not. The wind moves through the trees on the soundtrack. That is roughly the level of excitement on offer.
I know, I know. For the admirers of Straub-Huillet, and there are serious ones, every quality I am describing as a flaw is precisely the point. The rawness, the anti-theatrical delivery, the refusal of conventional seduction, these are not bugs but features. The natural soundscape is not an absence of score but a deliberate choice about what cinema owes and does not owe its audience. I can frame the argument. I just cannot feel it. Where their champions apparently hear rigour and purity, I heard an hour of people droning through a text I had no route into and no earthly reason to pursue.
And that is the thing that gets me, more than the boredom itself. I am not against difficulty. I am not against slowness or abstraction or films that require you to bring something to the table. But the best of that tradition meets you somewhere. It builds a door, even a narrow one. This felt less like a locked door than no door at all, just a long, smooth wall with nothing to grip.
Huillet died the same year this was released, which gives it an unavoidable weight as a final statement, and I would not for a moment suggest it was made carelessly or without conviction. I am quite certain it is precisely the film they intended to make, every flat reading and every lingering landscape exactly where they wanted it. I am just as certain it was not made for anyone remotely like me.
Half a star. A rating I reserve, by my own long-standing rule, for a film I would genuinely rather have spent doing the washing up. The washing up, at least, leaves you with something clean at the end.
Rating: ½ | Year: 2006 | Watched: 2026-08-28
