The people dotting Leonor Teles’ shorts are all caught in the midst of seismic transformations, drifters who watch their home turfs push them away and change at mind-blowing speed. Her Berlinale-winning Batrachian’s Ballad (2016) offered an incendiary study of the Romani experience in present-day Portugal filtered through the prism of Teles’ own roots in the local Ciganos community; Ashore (2018) tailed an aging fisherman from a riverfront village perched between tradition and modernity; and Dogs Barking at Birds (2019) followed a working-class family wrestling with the capital’s rampant gentrification. Thai for “home,” the title of Teles’ feature debut literalizes a preoccupation that’s been at the cornerstone of all the director’s films. In its barest terms, Baan is a chronicle of a tumultuous romance stretching across weeks and time zones, but it’s also and most significantly a snapshot of 21st-century restlessness, a portrait of two young wanderers for whom the title remains an unfulfilled promise. Teles, who also serves as co-writer and cinematographer, has an eye for scenes that throb with unexpressed longing. Yet the script doesn’t live up to the power of the images, and the numerous cinematic references Baan teems with seldom complicate or expand the locales they’re grafted onto.
Still, at its most vulnerable, it evokes a sense of emotional and geographical dislocation that makes for a confounding experience. Carried forth by Sandra T. and Lívia Serpa’s editing, and shot by Teles in sultry 16mm, Baan keeps hopscotching across time and space. We begin in a hotel room in Bangkok at dawn and then bolt West, to Lisbon, where thirty-something architect L (Carolina Miragaia) happens into and falls for K (Meghna Lall), a Thai-born Canadian for whom the Portuguese capital is only a momentary stop in a long journey of self-discovery.
But the film takes its time before getting to the rendezvous; for a while Baan is happy to just dog L as she wanders aimlessly around cityscapes that Teles melds together in a single, sinuous urban voyage. Scenes do not begin or end in Baan so much as spill into each other, and it’s credit to the director that this effect isn’t alienating but strangely hypnotic. These early moments are the film’s strongest, and coincide with the script’s most elliptical sections. We don’t know much about L yet––don’t know the reasons behind her trip to Bangkok, don’t know whether Thailand happened before or after Portugal––and Teles steers clear from connect-the-dots impulses. While links and explanations will emerge, Baan seems––at least initially––uninterested in spelling out its plot and is all the stronger for it.
The peekaboo editing is itself a dramatic principle. As it seesaws between the two cities, following L into a club in Lisbon only to catapult her on the streets of Bangkok in the blink of a cut, the film both adjusts to and amplifies her disorientation. Teles knows how to render that visually. The director––who recently shot João Canijo’s Berlinale-winning two-part project Bad Living and Living Bad––intersperses L’s globetrotting with languid interludes that capture the thirty-something gazing in jet-lagged wonder at the world around her: bustling streets, empty convenience stores, glimpses of the urban uncanny, all like a shot of jellyfish undulating in a giant digital billboard––alien creatures in alien landscapes. While Thailand and Portugal are two wildly different backdrops, there’s a continuity to Teles’ cinematography that bridges their distance: a penchant for bright primary colors, for neon-infused nighttime shots, for compositions that often dwarf her actresses into empty space.
What emerges is a cine-mosaic that’s in keeping with the fragmented experiences of its protagonists. But Baan struggles to put their alienation into words, and when it tries the results ring oddly artificial. Its script, written by Teles, Francisco Mira Godinho, and Ágata de Pinho, wends towards exchanges that do not suggest so much as telegraph dramatic beats. Conversations designed to elucidate the characters’ ennui feel stilted when they don’t slip into outright speechifying.
It’s a bug that extends to the film’s politics, too. Baan is not the first work by Teles that thrums with rabid fury at the powers that be and the exclusionary practices inflicted on the country’s outcasts––one of the most indelible images in Batrachian’s Ballad was Teles visiting a few shops and smashing ceramic frogs, a symbol of antiziganism designed to ward off the Roma. Though her first feature also crackles with anger, it feels much more diluted. K and her friends of Asian descent tell L about the bilious racism they’ve suffered in Portugal and abroad, and L herself witnesses instances of xenophobia around her hometown. Halfway through she joins K to litter Lisbon with graffiti calling for the end of Bolsonaro’s government, ceasing anti-Asian hate, liberating Hong Kong––cries for justice that are all sacrosanct and well-intended but don’t carry the cathartic or rebellious spirit the film strives to wring out of them.
Baan makes no secret of its many influences. Wong Kar-wai is sourced throughout––from scenes unfurling inside smoky pool bars to visual effects that evoke his step-printing and overcranking technique, as seen in Chungking Express. So is Hou Hsiao-hsien: halfway through, Teles copy-pastes the first two minutes of Millennium Mambo, trailing after K as she strolls in slow motion down a neon-lit skywalk like Shu Qi did to the pulsating synths of Lim Giong’s “A Pure Person.” These are all noble shout-outs that Baan never quite synthesizes. It treats creative ancestors as layers to be piled onto new landscapes: neither the artistic idioms nor those locales come out stronger for the encounter.
Baan is often stunning to look at, which makes its cinematic detritus and clunkier dialogues all the more conspicuous. Whenever it tries verbalizing characters’ alienation and their spasmodic need to belong, it undercuts its own perturbing mystique. Nothing in Baan conveys L and K’s loneliness quite like its most enigmatic early stretches, when Teles forsakes explanations to capture her actresses as they gaze––at each other, at the cities around them. It’s in these moments that the film manages to immortalize the ineffable nostalgia that powers it, and Baan swells its romance into something larger: a canvas for a whole generation.
Baan premiered at the 2023 Locarno Film Festival