Chapter 6 - Life, Risk and the Structuring Force of Exposure in Maelström

Summary

Differences between insides and outsides unfold in a manner of degrees in Denis Villeneuve’s Maelström (2000). In the film, a series of talking fish (voiced by Pierre Lebeau) narrate the story of Bibiane (Marie-Josée Croze) as she experiences a series of events, which include an abortion, a failure in business, a fatality caused while driving under the influence, an attempted suicide, and a plane crash. Eventually, with the support of her friend Claire (Stephanie Morgenstern) and a stranger (Marc Gélinas) in the subway, Bibiane develops a romantic relationship with Evian (Jean-Nicolas Verreault) even though she accidently killed his father (Kliment Denchev). A melancholic malaise caused by day-to-day experiences within globalisation, late capitalism, and citification may be a key theme within the film, but Maelström also challenges our assumptions about the roots of this condition by exposing that the potentiality for a world outside of these experiences always already exists within us. In relation to this key theme, Brenda Longfellow eloquently argues that Maelström represents the uneasiness of living within a milieu determined by globalisation, late capitalism, and citification. However, building on Longfellow’s insights, I contend that films do not simply represent postmodern conditions or theory, but can also unfold cinematic forms necessary to imagine the potentialities beyond such circumstances. Rather than connecting the film as evidence of what exists in the world, reading Maelström with a methodology inspired by radical formalism – as opposed to a representational methodology – can open up a potential world or, at least, potentialities beyond the conditions of globalisation, late capitalism, and citification, even if fleeting. On the promise of radical formalism, Eugenie Brinkema maps a methodology that generates ‘a reading without guarantee that secures nothing, whose rhythms unfold a contingent world instead of being for the sake of evidencing a necessary truth taken to be already fully lodged in the world’ (‘Form’ 265). Launching from this position, my chapter maps how the cinematic forms of Maelström generate the capacity to rethink life through exposures and the risks that accompany them.

One tenet of poststructuralist theory – and theory in general – takes shape by exposing alternatives to our assumptions about the world.