Directorial debut Neither Heaven Nor Earth is a stentorian statement of intent that Clément Cogitore is a cinematic upstart worthy of attention. The film is a high-degree-of-difficulty work, both a war movie and a contemplative drama, both sci-fi-adjacent and grounded firmly in reality. It interrogates the interminable war in Afghanistan as well as the boundless War on Terror as the contemporary embodiment of the Western imperial project. It contrasts the bleak landscape of the Afghan frontier with the vacuous soul of the postmodern person. Throughout, Cogitore proves he is capable of creating a minimalist cinema of grand ideas.
Neither Heaven Nor Earth follows the misadventures of a French platoon deployed to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. There, they monitor the transnational traffic flow, “help” a village of disinterested locals and simply try to pass the time. The war is in its second decade and the stagnation generates a sort of performative malaise in all parties involved: troops, villagers and even the Taliban-linked guerrillas. They each have a geopolitically-assigned role to play and do it well.
One routine night, the villagers perform a religious rite, distracting two French guards who then vanish by the next morning. The torpor of the pretend war is shattered by the disappearance, similarly to analogous stories L’Avventura and About Elly. Suddenly, the garrison commander, Antarès (Jérémie Renier)—a name pregnant with sci-fi significance (“Star Trek,” Melancholia and the Aldebaran series)—becomes a man of action, possessed by the desire to find his missing men. He threatens the villagers to return them, but they insist they do not have the men. A third soldier disappears in a virtuoso long take that changes the timbre of the film. Antarès then violates the terms of the military occupation, negotiating with the Taliban for the patrolmen’s return. Not only do the guerrillas not have his men, but they too are missing fighters. Soon, a fourth French troop goes missing.
Antarès uncovers a supernatural explanation: the area with the outpost from which the men vanished is “Allah’s Land.” Any living thing that sleeps on the ground on Allah’s Land is taken away. The vanished men all fell asleep on patrol and were, seemingly, taken by a metaphysical force. Antarès, priding himself as a practical, atheistic and modern man, does not accept this explanation. He takes ever more extreme measures, to the point of inciting mutiny or his arrest for war crimes.
While weaving this fraught, obdurately-realist yarn of wartime peril, Neither Heaven Nor Earth remains visually stunning, captivatingly edited and intellectually unrelenting. The desert photography of the area heightens the alienating nature of the plot. The story does not accord with normal earthly experience, but neither does the setting. It looks extraterrestrial—another call back to L’Avventura. The camera work is realist and stark, at times even vérité, ever grounding the action through concrete images of the physical world. The cinematography also deliberately evokes the ethereal, unknowable nature of the threat faced by the soldiers. In one unforgettable scene that encapsulates the film’s brilliance and ambition, the camera focuses on a tattoo of two staring human eyes inked onto the back of a soldier dancing around a bonfire in a pseudo-religious fit of ecstasy—the very personification of the film’s delicate balancing act between the real and the hyperreal.
What is most extraordinary about Neither Heaven Nor Earth are the political, cultural and epistemological questions it raises. This is a film about colonialism, violence and Western ethnocentrism. It is, after all, set in a literal frontier zone, which it utilizes as a springboard into postcolonial theory. It is also a film about the confrontation between the scientific and the religious, between a world of faith and one of empiricism, between pre-modern sensibilities about the causality of events and postmodern ones. The mystery of occulted soldiers defies scientific explanation, but Antarès resists supernatural ones to the bitter end.
The most poignant ideas wrestled with in Neither Heaven Nor Earth are those which cast into doubt the very project of Western knowledge and knowing. For instance, the film reclaims Plato’s Cave analogy, reversing its meaning. The cinematography employs an arsenal of visual illusions involving light and dark; the viewer cannot trust what is seen. Perhaps a bit heavy-handedly, the patrols’ night-vision goggles are also sometimes not enough to enable knowledge of what waits in the dark. The soldiers (and the viewer) have returned to ignorance. The ideals upon which Western modernity has predicated itself are similarly challenged, making the film itself an unsettling experience.
While Neither Heaven Nor Earth’s concluding scenes are disappointing, they also further illustrate its core thesis. The ending is unsatisfying and it does not resolve the plot’s questions. The editing, so inch-perfect in its long-take style for the first 90 minutes, unravels into choppy confusion. But in many ways this fits with the message of the film: the West’s brazen confidence in its own interpretation of the world is the source of the violence it both unleashes and in turn receives from those excluded by its paradigms of knowledge, morality and economic prosperity. The frontier zone of “Allah’s Land,” by defying the limits of Western epistemology, metaphorically also stages the collapse of the Western imperial project. It necessitates, too, an incomplete resolution to the film’s narrative.
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