Forest High

“Unable to be silent, I will be long and still”. Arriving during a hushed poetry recitation, it’s as close to a mission statement as Manon Coubia’s laconic, gently ambling feature debut comes. As we follow the first of three caretakers of a mountain hut and visitors’ destination in the Alps (Salome Richard, Aurelia Petit and Anne Coesens, respectively), Coubia slows to the patient crawl of daily minutiae and stays there, the buzz of crickets, clink of cutlery and distant jangling of cowbells offering its own scoring. In each of its three vignettes, exceedingly little can be said to actually happen in Forest High, and much of what does is merely one day’s echo of another. Come spring, summer and snow-capped winter, the tables must still be laid out, the beds prepared and retreated to in faint exhaustion, the food prepared. Mileage may well vary on whether Coubia’s patience becomes the audience’s own, but those who resonate on its wavelength may well be content to drift without any concession to the bothersome obligations of plot. The film encourages the mind to wander pleasantly, and instead of tweeness, the result feels like a welcome retreat into the quiet.

It’s a further boon to Coubia’s cause that her microscopic approach still leaves room for dreamlike wisps of poetry, from night mist gradually concealing a full moon to the Edenic image of two naked lodgers sunbathing in a hidden forest glade. The goal is not, then, to juxtapose the banal rustlings of human beings against such grand natural backdrops, but something more generous. If they cannot be made part and parcel of their environment, the imperfect striving of its visitors for total, embodied silence can be captured, along with the history the quiet holds.

In one of the small, elliptical hints of narrative that surface throughout, Coesens’s winter resident listens attentively to a wayward young man as he tells her of the repository of family memory this small pitstop is, the place forever marked by a family in flight from war and deportation camps. The moment is all the more affecting for having arrived on so non-loquacious a path, and in moments such as this and Petit’s tremulous, shy disclosure of deeply personal poetry, Coubia’s film can locate its heart. Amidst the splendour of the mountains, the risk and reward of one person opening themselves up to others remains most essential.

Though it risks overstaying its welcome, this gentle, undemonstrative debut’s calm and quiet feel like a welcome balm, with unforced performances and striking images lulling viewers into something approaching a genuine state of grace.