Ghost Trail
aka Les fantômes First screened and reviewed in May 2024
Director: Jonathan Millet. Cast: Adam Bessa, Tawfeek Barhom, Shafiqa El Till, Julia Franz Richter, Hala Rajab, Faisal Alia, Pascal Cervo, Mudar Ramadan. Screenplay: Jonathan Millet and Florence Rochat. VOR:④
Without denying the truths of most migrants' experience, finds an original, risky, and stylistically vivid way to re-present that story.
Ghost Trail (originally Les Fantômes) starts inside the dark, echoing desperation of a cargo truck full of panicking migrants. As overbright light floods in and the Syrian survivors of this odyssey step with exhausted bewilderment into the Turkish desert, the camera tracks long enough in closeup on one face to single him out as our protagonist. Then he drops dead: an economical way of suggesting that this is how many of these sweltering, cramped, dehydrated journeys end for the world's numberless exiles.
The story of Hamid (Tunisian actor Adam Bessa), soon subbed into the now-vacated role of lead character, thus carries the weight from the outset of how easily his fate could have been even more merciless. It's still, of course, quite bad, and in some ways remains a nightmarish extension of how it began. As we swiftly cut two years in the future to find Hamid toiling on a Strasbourg construction site (with, unsurprisingly, very few French-born workers), the noise closely resembles that inside the truck but is even more deafening, and the choking dust and rubbly surroundings may as well still be that desert into which he was first deposited.
Ghost Trail, a very impressive first feature by documentarian Jonathan Millet, retains these skills throughout: digging deeply into Hamid's experience while capturing some texture in the differently unenviable lives around him; using image, sound, editing, and story structure to complicate Hamid's story well beyond the top layers of plot. Even those ostensible basics are plenty complex. Millet's script initially frames Hamid's hypervigilance to surroundings, wariness of connection, and (yet) dogged inquiries to strangers about the subject of a closely guarded photograph as the plight of a man amid forced diaspora: undocumented, dispossessed, yearning for lost intimates. But other signals soon accumulate that Hamid may be working as a hitman in pursuit of someone who tortured Hamid and cost many people their lives in Syria's hellish civil war. Not at every second is the audience clear whether Hamid was a rebel in that war or an agent of Assad, and because of the Le Carré-ish genre we gradually realize we're in, even clear cues may be false flags.
Maybe Hamid lies about his whereabouts over Zoom to his mother, who's only made it as far as Beirut, because he wants her to believe he's happier and more secure than he is… or maybe she's better off not knowing the truth. Maybe his cited backstory as a university literature professor is an index of how far he's plummeted in social station, or maybe it's a biography into which few people will press. (I'm a university literature professor; it's often a conversation-stopper.) Maybe the darting school of different aliases he deploys with coworkers, shelter acquaintances, shadowy contacts, and a possible love interest are wise choices by a man whose candor would invite danger, or maybe he himself is an agent of danger. Maybe many or all of these options hold true.
Tinker Migrant Sniper Spy: it's a nifty conceit for a movie, refreshing in its inspired originality, with the further, significant virtue of being so well-executed. Stylistically, Millet's film stays mostly planted in the handheld cameras, slow zooms, and pounded pavements of many Dardennes-ish parables of contemporary life beyond the margins of the margins, but this approach rarely feels stale or citational. When the camera suddenly freezes or the palette shifts or the framings get more artful, you notice: it's clear the movie's identity is subtly multiple, the same way you feel yourself sliding across the first half between opposed deductions about who Hamid is and what he's ultimately up to, what principles or needs are most tantamount for him.
Perhaps most notably, there's a long, very tense cafeteria tête-à-tête between two important characters that had more than one viewer at Cannes talking about the De Niro/Pacino diner scene in Heat, but by the time Mann's sequence rolled around, we had rich context for both characters (and for both actors). In Ghost Trail's loose analogue, we're still not positive who we're looking at, or what they mean to each other, or if they share the same narrative reality. None of these uncertainties lessen the suspense one bit.
Ghost Trail, the first film I saw at Cannes, stuck out immediately for its craft: not just a catch-all for overall shaping and finesse but for savvy scene-level deployments of a deft and enigmatic score, of shifts in editing rhythm and sound mix, of Bessa's charisma and concise eloquence as a performer. (He plays a mystery throughout but never settles for just being vague.) As the fortnight unfurled, with the usual highs, lows, and forgettable middles, I took these virtues even less for granted. Sure, dialogue is not yet Millet's strong suit and is sometimes awkwardly expository. As Hamid's own sense of his reality starts to slip, the editing and imagery sometimes reflect this in antic, familiar ways, and at least one key story point struck me and, as I later learned, others as not entirely legible as cut together, in ways that didn't feel intentional.
But otherwise, intent is exactly what Ghost Trail has in spades. The whole filmmaking team feels committed to their story as both a sleek deviation from typical migration plots and, in unexpected ways, an exaggerated mirroring of them. Ghost Trail has confidence, an artistry that's both knotty and lean, and significant plot-twisty entertainment value. I hope it gets the push and support it deserves, and that its opening night slot in Critics' Week is not that section's apex but its embarking point. A movie this good shouldn't stay a secret. Grade:B+
