{"id":202031,"date":"2025-10-04T18:35:28","date_gmt":"2025-10-04T18:35:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/202031\/"},"modified":"2025-10-04T18:35:28","modified_gmt":"2025-10-04T18:35:28","slug":"ulrich-kohlers-patchy-but-provocative-meta-drama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/202031\/","title":{"rendered":"Ulrich K\u00f6hler’s Patchy but Provocative Meta-Drama"},"content":{"rendered":"

Coined by American philosopher W.V. Quine, \u201cGavagai<\/a>\u201d is a nonsense word meant to convey the indeterminacy of translation. The classic example: A British ethnologist visits some \u201cexotic\u201d foreign land, where a speaker of the native tongue points to a rabbit and says \u201cgavagai.\u201d While the natural assumption would be that \u201cgavagai\u201d is the local word for \u201crabbit,\u201d the reality is that \u201cgavagai<\/a>\u201d could just as easily mean \u201cfood,\u201d \u201cpet,\u201d \u201cmammal,\u201d or \u201cwe\u2019re all vegans<\/a> here.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Some assumptions are more plausible than others, but the fact remains that no two people can ever perfectly understand one another, let alone two people from completely different backgrounds. Communication is miscommunication, and if that\u2019s true of a single word, then it\u2019s exponentially more so of an ancient play, or a modern adaptation of it, or \u2014\u00a0say \u2014\u00a0of a racist incident that occurs to the lead actor of a modern adaptation of an ancient play in the hours before the new \u201cMedea\u201d he stars in is set to premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"(Clockwise<\/a> \"ANEMONE,<\/a> <\/p>\n

So goes the premise of Ulrich K\u00f6hler\u2019s \u201cGavagai,\u201d a patchy but provocative thought exercise of a movie that fittingly neglects to explain its title (hence the preamble here), which is all the better to let viewers arrive at their own interpretations. Loosely inspired by his experience shooting \u201cSleeping Sickness\u201d (2011) in Cameroon, when the well-intentioned German director \u2014 sweating under the pressures of running a set in a distant country with a local crew \u2014\u00a0wound up \u201creproducing the neocolonial hierarchies and behavioral patterns that we address in the film<\/a>\u201d (as he puts it in the \u201cGavagai\u201d press notes), this stilted meta-drama allows K\u00f6hler to more deliberately trace the inexorable tensions that underpin today\u2019s globalized film trade.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Here, he recasts himself as a French director named Caroline (an extremely Claire Denis-coded Nathalie Richard), who seems a bit too headstrong and oblivious to appreciate why her Senegalese reimagining of Euripides\u2019 tragedy \u2014\u00a0in which the titular child-murderer is an entitled white immigrant who\u2019s reduced to refugee status after her native Black husband betrays her \u2014 could potentially reaffirm the same hierarchies of privilege that it hopes to address. Caroline is a headstrong liberal who\u2019s doing what she can to push civilization forward according to her understanding of what that means, but flipping the script on racist stereotypes may not be the most effective way of dismantling them, especially when the process of doing so finds the director stranding her extras in the hot Dakar sun for 10 hours at a time while denying them access to the craft services tent.\u00a0<\/p>\n

To its credit, K\u00f6hler\u2019s film is much less interested in wallowing in such archly observed (and self-exculpatory) ironies than it is in articulating how difficult they are to avoid in a world where nothing is a rabbit, and everything is \u201cgavagai.\u201d 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\u2019s dead children have been outfitted with life jackets for safety reasons), \u201cGavagai\u201d soon keys into a wide variety of overlapping \u2014 and sometimes conflicting \u2014\u00a0realities about the process of exhuming an ancient text, most of which are more sober in tone.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For starters, Caroline projects her frustration onto her lead actress, Maja (Maren Eggert), who she argues is too bourgeois to play an outcast \u201csavage\u201d capable of killing her own kids. The director is unaware that Maja \u2014 who FaceTimes her husband and daughter back home in Berlin during her breaks on set \u2014\u00a0is secretly having an affair with the film\u2019s Jason (\u201cSleeping Sickness\u201d star Jean-Christophe Folly, wonderful as Nourou, a character who\u2019s always taking uncertain shape of his burden), which hardly rises to the crime of homicide, but suggests that Caroline doesn\u2019t perceive her cast as clearly as she might think.\u00a0<\/p>\n

She\u2019s certainly oblivious to the anxieties that have confronted her leading man by virtue of his accepting a major role in this splashy European production. She\u2019s blithely unaware that Nourou\u2019s Senegalese identity is so threatened that he can only justify his part in the film by insisting that it\u2019s a masterpiece, even if the frequent clips we see of the finished product make it look like a hodgepodge of all the worst ideas that Julie Taymor never had (jet skis can only add so much to a 2,500-year-old play).\u00a0<\/p>\n

Nourou\u2019s awareness of his own \u201ccomplicity\u201d in the project \u2014 the uncertain degree to which he\u2019s swallowing his doubts about the movie in order to enjoy the benefits of being in it \u2014\u00a0is left ambiguous, but other tensions produced by his performance are more evident on the surface. A high-status artist in the African city where \u201cMedea\u201d is shot, Nourou is forced to assume the role of barely tolerated outsider in the German city where the film is slated to premiere, a downshift in privilege that leads to a racist incident outside of the Berlin hotel where he\u2019s staying for the festival. A hostile security guard treats Nourou with undue suspicion, questioning his right to enter the lobby of the Intercontinental; the actor is understandably irked by the encounter, but it\u2019s Maja who sees it as a chance to perform her identity as a good white lady, and perhaps to openly defend the lover she\u2019s otherwise ashamed to keep as a secret. It\u2019s Maja who adopts the role of savior and insists that the security guard be fired.<\/p>\n

\u00a0This too is based on a real incident, as a bigoted staffer \u2014\u00a0maybe or maybe not at the Intercontinental \u2014\u00a0confronted Folly after the premiere of \u201cSleeping Sickness.\u201d This is also a chance for K\u00f6hler to redress his reaction to the event, and to examine how his reflexive transformation into a white savior may have been more for his own benefit than anything else. Like so much of \u201cGavagai,\u201d the encounter is filmed from a remove (and in this case additionally obfuscated by a glass door), which doesn\u2019t approximate some kind of objectivity so much as it heightens our attention to the nature of perspective.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Once again, this story is not being told through the eyes of its victim, but through those of his director, and while \u201cGavagai\u201d avoids any self-flagellating displays of white guilt, the film is only so interesting because K\u00f6hler is keenly aware that he\u2019s at risk of repeating this cycle of moral relativism, and making the fact of his awareness more important than Folly\u2019s experience of prejudice. Is the act of extrapolating that experience into a feature-length film meant to absolve K\u00f6hler of his embarrassment over how it played out in real life, or \u2014 by reducing a long-time collaborator to his role in a particularly dehumanizing moment \u2014 is the director further confining Folly to the limits of his neoliberal gaze?\u00a0<\/p>\n

These would be easy questions for K\u00f6hler to address on his own behalf, but \u201cGavagai\u201d complicates them well beyond the yes\/no binary (even if the film is weakened by its quasi-cartoonish portrait of Caroline\u2019s blinkered privilege, which prevents her from displaying any trace of self-awareness). Every scene is relaxedly suffused with the tension between the limits of perspective and the empathy of storytelling, until the act of seeing becomes as problematized as the refusal to look, and the boundaries between reality and fiction grow as blurred as those between the various genres that \u201cGavagai\u201d swirls into an unclassifiable sludge.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The last act of this movie becomes a ticking clock thriller set during the \u201cMedea\u201d premiere, by which point \u201cGavagai\u201d has already refracted the dynamic between K\u00f6hler and his subject into an inescapable house of mirrors that\u2019s less interesting for its reflections than it is for the parallax of considering them from different angles. Those angles can be too obtuse in the moments when they aren\u2019t unavoidably acute, and I can\u2019t help but wish that K\u00f6hler had jettisoned the unhelpful \u201cMedea\u201d flashbacks in favor of a more explicitly self-reflexive approach that elevated the \u201cSleeping Sickness\u201d of it all from backstory to text. Still, \u201cGavagai\u201d remains worthwhile because it constantly adds new dimensions to the question of who this \u2014 or any \u2014\u00a0film is \u201cfor\u201d in a world where even the simplest gestures can be lost in translation, and every viewer is left to arrive at their own meaning.<\/p>\n

Grade: B-<\/p>\n

\u201cGavagai\u201d premiered at the 2025 New York Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.<\/p>\n

Want to stay up to date on IndieWire\u2019s film\u00a0reviews<\/a>\u00a0and critical thoughts?\u00a0Subscribe here<\/a>\u00a0to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings \u2014\u00a0all only available to subscribers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Coined by American philosopher W.V. Quine, \u201cGavagai\u201d is a nonsense word meant to convey the indeterminacy of translation.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":202032,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,2695,110222,206,116350,900],"class_list":{"0":"post-202031","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-film","10":"tag-gavagai","11":"tag-movies","12":"tag-nyff","13":"tag-reviews"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=202031"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202031\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/202032"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=202031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=202031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=202031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}