Cinéma vérité may be the filmic equivalent of a cold plunge: it doesn’t immerse viewers so much as it submerges them into narrative and lifeworlds rather than acclimatising them to fact or fiction. There are advantages to this approach, as much as it might cause discomfiture. Audiences are forced to remain alert, engaged, and inquisitive until long after credits roll, and that is exactly the state they ought to be in to grapple with difficult questions. As far back as Jean Rouch’s experimentations with juxtaposing racial politics with teenagers’ interpersonal conflicts in 1961’s HUMAN PYRAMID, the style gains its heft from the trust it places in viewers and subjects alike to tread even in tumultuous water.
Screened at Ibero Docs in its Scottish Premiere, Adrián Orr’s second feature, TO OUR FRIENDS, begins with a signature cinéma vérité plunge as two of its subjects clamber out of a pool. One half of this duo is Sara, a high school student teetering on major metamorphoses. A versatile social butterfly, Sara alternates between smoking with her friends at a skatepark and gravely rehashing exam questions with her classmates. Sara is responsible. From minding the pizza in the oven at a house party to trimming her friend’s hair, there are signposts beyond her studiousness to suggest that she is a generally capable person with a bright future.
After graduating high school, Sara joins a theatre group and falls in love with one of the girls in her troupe. As the romance intensifies, other bonds weaken, and Sara must learn to accept what she loses and what she gains as she moves through life and spreads her wings.
“An attentive eye reveals that the cast are all playing themselves. Orr himself appears as the director of the play in which Sara is starring. Meta moments like these are tricky to pull off, and TO OUR FRIENDS seems to stick the landing.”
At a glance, there isn’t much formally to signal anything special underneath what is already an adventurous and austere take on a queer coming-of-age story. TO OUR FRIENDS is replete with an almost intrusive type of cinematography. Every shot shudders a little with the rhythm of someone’s breathing, eternally glued and attuned to Sara and her emotional state like an overly attentive tag-along in a group of friends. The effect is as potent as it is exhausting. To experience TO OUR FRIENDS is to be entirely sucked into the nuances and subtleties of Sara’s social world during her highs and feeling intense desperation to come up for air during her lows.
Questions abound well into the film’s credits, though. An attentive eye reveals that the cast are all playing themselves. Orr himself appears as the director of the play in which Sara is starring. Meta moments like these are tricky to pull off, and TO OUR FRIENDS seems to stick the landing. Something about mingling fact with fiction makes some fulsome comment on the filters that lie between us in most social settings. In some sense, the film seems to posit, there is a touch of rehearsal and (as Orr directs Sara within the film) a “touch of improvisation” to every interaction in every relationship.
TO OUR FRIENDS posits some kind of theory about the tectonic shifts our social worlds go through and forwards that theory with documentarian conventions. In attempting to figure themselves out, people are always making it up as they go along, and their relationships may thrive or suffer in the wake of life’s vicissitudes. Wave after wave might strike us, and all we can really do is just keep treading water.