Wood and Water: Stillness and Silence Speak Volumes
Wood and Water: Stillness and Silence Speak Volumes
There's hardly any narrative to offer with Jonas Bak’s Wood and Water that isn’t a concern. It is a contemplative piece about the constantly evolving world that we are all faced with in our own distinct ways. Evocatively put together, we follow Anke whose life feels almost imbued to just about everything going on all around her as her life reaches many of its crescendos—retirement, abandonment—she tries to break away from the stagnation she feels and make her own way.
Humble and austere, this ode to loneliness and motherhood feels incredibly poignant and poetic as it explores the solitude of a mother-son relationship in a world that is becoming more and more globalized. The film reminded me of another film that I wrote about, The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin). Both blur the line between fiction and non-fiction. Both are interested in people’s relationships to places, and put a huge emphasis on the way the silence and sound defines those places. While The Works and Days is a recreation and projection of the past in the manner of James Benning, Wood and Water is more of a projection of the future, very Akerman in spirit—with themes of alienation and solitude and Hong Kong and its democratic protests as its backdrop.
Wood and Water is about exploring oneself through unfamiliar places, yearning for people, and trying desperately to connect with them through the places that have a great significance to them. In the film, Anke wanders the streets of Hong Kong, talks to the locals that live there, and wonders what drew her son to the country. There’s a sublime beauty in the way Jonas Bak explores the story. In one scene, he gracefully transitions from the towering trees of the Black Forest in Germany to the brimming skyscrapers of Hong Kong—he does it in a way that is so placid and serene.
He explores the fragility of familial connections through the journey of a widow into a new political reality, accompanied by the use of 16mm film and trancelike soundscapes that exude permanence. The film invites us to contemplate on our existence in this world for momentarily, to search for the meaning of motherhood and longing. The transition from the rural environment to the sights and sounds of a sprawling city lulls the audiences and allows for the story to gently sink in, but also at the same time it’s viewed as a kind of way to resolve the longing of Anke; leaving her home; her two other children; her comfort zone to fulfill the longing that she has been long searching for. In Wood and Water, the loneliness, alienation, and forms of relationships that are formed in our globalized world are subtly explored, centering on dualities like the lives between the rural and the city, their spiritualities and philosophies, on being alone or being together. It's like a meditation, a journey that aims to dissipate the polarities among these things. Its narrative is being merely spoken through the tone and atmosphere of the film. Its slow pace, subdued imagery, and its sound design serves as a visual, auditory, and intellectual exercise in seeing and discovering beauty in the mundane.
We as the audience were also able to discover the new environment that Anke is in, creating such a humanistic experience in the end. Albeit Anke's situation isn't quite resolved by the film’s conclusion—she still hasn't met her son—something does change, as a result of the realization that everybody else struggles to cope with life's constant changes, seeking solace in this constantly progressing world. Anke’s journey through a foreign land in an attempt to find her son, has become something more, through her brief encounters with people, her sorrow that’s left unspoken, Anke finds herself. The stillness and silence of Wood and Water speak volumes.
