A Festival of Opening Sequences

Throughout the year, during festivals or screenings, spectators, critics, and film students are permanently impressed by a strong opening sequence at the beginning of a feature or short film. As such, the 72nd San Sebastián International Film Festival (SSIFF) will remain an unprecedented concentration in terms of launching stories: out of the sixteen films in competition, at least ten started with impressive, striking images. A real festival of opening sequences distinguished themselves both in their power and diversity: some pose or summarize the film, others give true or false clues to the story to be followed, still others offer images with no apparent link to the plot, but which, after the fact, shed light on the issues at stake.

This long series began with the opening film in competition, Emmanuelle (2024): a new vision – far from the male glaze of the original – by the French filmmaker Audrey Diwan, based on the cult book by Emmanuelle Arsan. In the first-class cabin of an airliner, the camera frames a thigh of the heroine played by comedian Noémie Merlant. Her hand pulls on her skirt, very slightly, revealing the flesh, without however revealing the whole leg. As if Emmanuelle could not decide to show more: this gesture, which expresses both desire and restraint, condenses the entire purpose of the film. The same idea prevails in the opening scene of Serpent’s Path (Hebi no michi, 2024), by the great Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa. The film opens with a deep view [close-up?] of the main female character, Sayoko (Kô Shibasaki) standing on her back in a street in Paris. From the next shot, a complex and violent plot will be set up and many important characters will enter the scene. But the filmmaker sends a clear message: whatever or who we see next, Sayoko is the heart of the film, and indeed, the story will gradually refocus on her.

Conclave (2024), by Edward Berger, opens with a shoulder-camera shot showing the back of a cardinal running through Rome. Cardinal Lomeli (Ralph Fiennes) is late for one of the most important events in his life: the Pope has just died, he is expected to organize the upcoming conclave of which he is in charge. The ecclesiastical thriller then follows the essence of this scene: Lomeli has to investigate and is often late for a clue to solve several enigmas. It’s the same kind of wrap-around sequence that Joshua Oppenheimer chose to open his new film, The End (2024). A woman wakes up screaming next to her husband. She comes, without neither she nor the audience knowing it, from a nightmare that reveals the plot for this mother of the last human family still living on Earth after a nuclear cataclysm. A nightmare that all the protagonists of the film will live daily.

The decidedly original option chosen by filmmaker Pilar Palomero to begin her new fiction feature, Glimmers (Los Destellos, 2024), which earned Patricia Lopez Arnaiz a much-deserved Silver Shell for Best Actress, is radically different. Isabel (Arnaiz), alone onscreen, wanders in a flea market before stopping to acquire an ancient outdoor game, the Game of the Frog. We will never see the game again in the film, which tells the story of a family rebuilding around Isabel’s dying ex-husband. Why this Game of the Frog and this opening sequence? They evoke nostalgia, death or deep inner wounds (the game is partly broken and incomplete), a past that was thought to be forever buried, but to which one remains unconsciously very attached; all the aspects of her life that Isabel will discover by chance – just as she discovers this ancient game.

Yet another approach to opening a film consists of offering viewers a false impression quickly contradicted by the plot. French director François Ozon does this with When fall is coming (Quand vient l’automne, 2024), which won two Silver Shell awards (Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Role), by launching the film with a scene in which his heroine, Michelle (Hélène Vincent) goes to mass in a provincial church: a clean, classic image of an elderly woman devotedly engaging in a weekly religious ritual. The image suggests a quiet portrait of a woman well in all respects: all false, Michelle will turn out to be in a not very catholic light, as they say in France. Bound in Heaven (Kun bang shang tian tang, 2024), by the Chinese director Huo Xin, winner of the Jury Prize for Best Cinematography, goes even further in this little game of dupes as an aperitif. Her first image shows the female lead character, Xia You, who was photographed by police while she was wanted for several crimes. The opening sets up a false sense of a female-driven thriller , but the filmmaker does not stop there, making us believe that she is taking us into a story of revenge by a woman beaten by her partner. Yet in the end, the film is more of a passion romance cum road trip, full of contrasts and ups and downs.

Opening a film sometimes means giving clues not only about the content of the story but also about its form, and even about the director himself. For instance, in the opening credits of Last Breath (Le dernier souffle, 2024) by the 91-year-old French veteran Costa Gavras. The camera films, with a vertical movement from top to bottom, the canvas of Gustav Klimt’s painting, “Life and Death,” in which a human skeleton appears rhythmically to an electro-dance music mixing sounds of medical imaging machines in a hospital. At the end of the film, we will understand the message: the end of life and palliative care are at the heart of the subject, but with a form that will shake and surprise. In a completely different genre, Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl (2024) has given us a process regularly used in the seventh art: opening with a scene that will be found later in the film, but cutting it out, so as not to reveal all the issues. A very powerful mode of operation here, since the sequence, where the dancing heroine of the film played by Pamela Anderson plays an audition on a stage in Las Vegas, will prove to be of crucial importance when we see it later in its entirety.

Last but not least, the big SSIFF winner Albert Serra, who won the Golden Shell for Best Film for Afternoons of Solitude (Tardes de soledad, 2024), offers us a two-edged sword opening plan, like his film. The camera moves into a limo, facing Roca Rey, a very popular torero in Spain whose documentary portrays him, to film him in a still shot while he exchanges comments with members of his team. A shooting system that will return throughout the film, alternating with images that are sumptuous but terrible, and sometimes difficult to stomach, of killing bulls (toros) in the arena. The controversy followed closely the screenings of the film that divided festivalgoers. Many of them interpreted the film as an anti-corrida pamphlet. But Serra has defended himself, and we can say that he defends himself from the outset with this plan: he first highlights the torero, not the toro. With this opening sequence always crucial for the audience, it underlines the feeling conveyed during ten days in San Sebastián: the filmmakers work more and more to mark the retina immediately, whatever impression they want to give us or the direction they want their work to take.

Renaud Baronian
Edited by Ela Bittencourt
© FIPRESCI 2024