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Valeska Grisebach’s long-awaited return to Cannes is her most ambitious film yet, and perhaps her best. ★★★★½
The dream adventure is very real
According to professional sentiment, archaeologists look down. They explore what others have buried and find meaning in the fragments. A useful discipline is to take it to Bulgaria’s borders, where the soil layers are deep and the recent past is uncomfortably close to the surface. Veska (Yana Radeva), the protagonist of Griesbach’s fourth feature film, works on excavations near the point where Bulgaria meets Greece and Turkey, the easternmost seam of Europe. What she discovers, after Sayid reappears in her life, is more ancient than 1989, when the continent reshaped itself in ways that benefited some and destroyed others.
Nine years have passed since then Western It was screened at Un Certain Regard and quietly acquired the status that good films do when critics have time to think. This film’s method was to take a strongly male-coded genre and pay slow, patient attention until the genre’s scaffolding became load-bearing and absurd. A dreamy adventure Attempts something similar through noir, but gradually shifts the center of gravity from the masculine to the feminine. The change matters not because Vesca is a more believable person than Said, but because the subject of the film (who receives the danger and from whom) benefits from a woman at the center.
said (Suleiman Letifov, returnee Western) arrives in Svilengrad without a car. Vesca helps him, and for the first hour the film proceeds in the manner of the city itself: incidents accumulate without apparent connection, and the narrative refuses to reveal its intentions. Side exit is smooth without bells. No scene marks it, no signal indicates the change. Vesca gradually becomes the proper subject of the story, drawn into the criminal environment in which she lives and into the orbit of a young girl, Maria, who is trained by one of the men in this environment.
The ruling logic of the film is topographical. Svilengrad’s frontier life is one of idleness: long evenings, circular conversations, deals that may or may not be done. Griesbach’s 167 minutes honors this rhythm without sentimentalizing it. Then things get serious and they do it without a blunt signal. Form obviously doesn’t make you. Nor life at the border crossing. That this structural choice is deliberate rather than a failure of dramatic pacing is something that the film’s detractors, several of whom have previously abandoned this screening, clearly failed to entertain.
One word on the title. Griesbach confirmed that the echo of Antonioni’s film was not intentional; The adventure in question was not intended as an intertextual signal, despite the fact that the Italian director is a big influence. Nevertheless, the resonance remains, though it lies in the relationship of the audience rather than in the narrative structure. when adventure Premiered at Cannes in 1960, there was a Bush; Antonioni was as shocked by the hostility as the audience was by the film. Griesbach’s grip is less tight than Antonioni’s, but the structural gambit is comparable: a disappearance that the film refuses to mourn, and a replacement that arrives without announcement. That being said, the title may be the least successful element of the film.
Griesbach, as usual, works with non-professional actors, and Radeva spends the second half of the film accumulating small choices rather than declarative moments. The film took time to win over this particular audience. That it did, and that the moment of conversion defies naming, could itself be one of the most useful pieces of information in this review, if it wasn’t just seen as the “favorite movie hardest to describe” option used in previous reviews. The film is not immediately welcoming. Nor is the border depicted on it.
Bernhard Keller’s cinematography adheres to the landscape’s own conditions. Griesebach spoke of meetings with people of his generation who experienced Bulgaria’s 1989 turnaround, and the aforementioned border, still marked by communist-era restrictions and the violence they spawned, is an argument in itself, not just a backdrop. The criminal infrastructure that Vesca is part of is presented as flatly as the idle evenings that precede it. No score sign is an alarm that the characters themselves can’t already feel.
The Jury Prize that the film received is a worthy award for a film that perhaps deserves the best. By the way, this is the same award adventure The victory ended in 1960. Still, any recognition for such a structurally daring film in the current film festival climate is to be applauded. The jury prize of 2025 was given to Masha Shilinsky, a compatriot of Griesebach.
