Marona's Fantastic Tale · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Istvan the builder is drawn as a slab, and his arms swing like crane jibs. That isn't what the man looks like. It's what he is to a dog who knows him mainly as weight crossing a room. Manole the acrobat, one chapter earlier, is a chain of articulated segments, all limb and no mass. Brecht Evens, the Belgian graphic novelist who designed the film, isn't caricaturing either man. He's drawing their function, because function is what a dog gets.

Deleuze has a word for a body presented this way: the gest. Not a gesture, but a posture that lays bare the social relation a body is stuck inside. Istvan's silhouette is his labor. You learn his class, his hours, and his exhaustion before he says a line. Animation usually stylizes appearance. Damian's film stylizes work.

The dog is hit by a car on a city street in the opening minutes. In the seconds left to her, she remembers everything, and the remembering is the film. Sunset Boulevard wrote this contract: the corpse narrates its own approach, suspense is drained on purpose, and what's left in the drain is elegy. Anca Damian signs it exactly, then does something to it that Wilder couldn't.

Deleuze was impatient with flashbacks. On their own they're a signpost — a past filed neatly behind a present, time kept obediently linear. He calls that unit the recollection-image: a dated memory you visit and return from. Marona has nowhere to return to. She's dying in the road for ninety minutes, so the memory loses its return ticket, and what should be a filing cabinet becomes something else. Deleuze's name for that something is sheets of past: not a memory retrieved but the past as a region you move around inside, every layer still present at once. Damian makes this literal in ink. Walls tint instead of blocking. Bodies show through one another. The film's most famous visual idea is a picture of how its time works.

Bergson gave Deleuze the other half. A living creature, in this account, is a gap: perception comes in, action goes out, and what makes it alive is the hesitation between — the centre of indetermination, the interval. Nearly all cinema grammar exists to close that interval. See the problem, act, the situation changes, cut. Marona's interval never closes. She perceives with enormous fineness and can alter nothing. She is moved between cities, renamed four times, left behind. Deleuze calls a character in this position a seer, a voyant, and calls what such a character is given pure optical and sound situations: images that can only be looked at and listened to, because no action is available to discharge them.

This is the reading that gets the film off the shelf it appears to belong on. Taken as a story about unconditional love, Marona risks being sentimental, and a little reproachful toward humans. Taken as a film about a seer, it isn't sweet at all. She isn't loyal by temperament; she is barred from acting, and the humans around her are not villains but people with functioning sensory-motor lives — jobs to take, apartments to leave — which is precisely the faculty she lacks. Bresson built the armature in Au hasard Balthazar: an animal passed hand to hand, each owner a moral episode, cruelty registered on a body that doesn't react and isn't editorialized. Damian inherits the structure whole. What she adds is an inside, without anthropomorphizing the outside.

She builds it out of space. Rooms arrive in fragments and are assembled afterward, so a kitchen can be a stack of transparent planes rather than a box. Sightlines run low. Human faces loom in, distorted by proximity. That is close to what Deleuze called an any-space-whatever in its disconnected form — space that has quit its job as a setting for action and become a set of affective pieces. And the transparency quietly dismantles cinema's most basic unit, the frame as a closed set. A camera's power has always come partly from what the frame withholds. Here nothing is withheld: the wall tints, and Pablo Pico's score sits back while the sound design keeps off-screen space running continuously. Occlusion turns out to be a human convention, and an ocular one. Smell doesn't have edges.

Colour carries the chapters. Palette and pattern logic change with each owner, so the look narrates what the plot narrates — the affective colour-image, a colour that absorbs a whole scene and its feeling. The craft debts are specific. Yellow Submarine established that a feature could hand its entire look to one outside illustrator and swap the graphic register per episode. Kirikou and the Sorceress proved flat unshaded colour fields could carry depth through layered planes instead of modeling. The Triplets of Belleville built a near-wordless feature around a dog's perceptual world and bodies distorted into single legible shapes. Damian's addition is digital compositing, which makes transparency cheap, so the layers can be simultaneous rather than sequential.

Dana Bunescu cuts it, importing the discipline she sharpened on 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days: withhold the reaction shot, let elision carry the violence. Owners simply stop being present. Almost no separation is dramatized. The links between episodes go slack on purpose, unhurried inside scenes and ruthless between them, which is how memory behaves when it's running out of time. And the French title promises an extraordinary voyage. It's a balade in Deleuze's sense — a trip that transforms nothing. She crosses two cities across a whole life and arrives back under a car.

One more inversion. The dog narrates. In life she has no language; the mix even puts human speech at the level of tone and rhythm before meaning, which is roughly what she'd hear. So the film's only eloquence belongs to the creature that possesses none — a testifying voice, legending a life it could never have told.

Why this matters for the art: animation is the movement-image's home ground. A drawn body wants something and moves; the gag is a sensory-motor circuit running at maximum efficiency; even the sad animal pictures are quests. Damian made a feature-length time-image in drawn animation, financed by European public money, and released it to families. She also demonstrated that drawn cinema never had to inherit photography's opacity. A camera cannot see through a wall. A pen can. Most animation spends that freedom on impossible movement. She spent hers on impossible perception.

Watch it again for the walls. Then ask what your own life would look like drawn by someone who only ever knew you by what your hands did.