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Listening to Others: On Antoine Bourges’ Fail to Appear

It starts with a photocopier in a dimly lit supply room: a fax is slowly being printed out with the report of a young man Eric (Nathan Roder) who has been charged with theft and who’ll need a social worker. The fiction begins and throughout Fail to Appear it’ll continue onward through subtle visual details in a setting that’s actually the one that it’s exploring. Antoine Bourges’ project, just like it was in his earlier East Hastings Pharmacy, is to use fiction to better articulate some of the world’s realities. To not simply document but to slow things down, really focus to better see and to think with the changes occurring around us. It’s at this formal level that Fail to Appear is really interesting. It’s the story of a young social worker Isolde (Deragh Campbell) trying to help her patients while also learning the tasks and responsibilities that go with the job. The great idea here is to cast someone unfamiliar with the milieu so that you can see the struggle to keep up, that of a mixture of care and confusion, eagerness and awkwardness. The film’s exploration of the world of social workers and its client’s matches the beginner’s journey that Isolde is going through. Then there’s the opening of the film up to the real world: there are the clients and other practitioners, its offices and community centres, courtrooms and neighbourhood surroundings. The world keeps intruding onto its fiction so that the film never ends up being self-contained. Its style also adds to its contemplation as the long-take form allows for the scenes to play out for as long as it’s necessary – for a person to say what they need to say, and for them to properly represent themselves – and its framing and stillness distils an emotion into the people that it portrays. Fail to Appear perfectly blends art-house cinema techniques with observational documentary and conceptual photography. It imagines a new way to look at the relationships between people and how they interact with their surroundings. If the actors in Fail to Appear remain somewhat impenetrable, whose motivations are never really clear, it instead proposes a good first step on how to create positive changes in people: that of listening and caring about others. So it is only after Isolde, who had already helped Eric avoid his charge, sent him a kind email that he would start to participate more in his family’s life. The film proposes that change and affect takes place at the level of these small gestures and how these can have a lasting positive influence. And in a province that overnight, with the Ontario elections, became a majority conservative government it’s even more vital to have these reminders of the personal struggles of the already underappreciated health care and social worker professionals and the people that they serve. It’s time to not turn away.