Voyages
dir. Emmanuel Finkiel
Opens Fri April 20 at the Grand Illusion.

A tour group meanders noisily through a Polish "city of the dead," a cemetery crowded with old Jewish graves. In this gray place, overgrown with towering trees that sway in some vaguely sinister breeze, a woman breaks away on her own to wander down an aisle between stone markers. In a long tracking movement, the camera parallels her, as she winks in and out of view between tree trunks and gravestones. As if under a spell, she lingers too long in her corner of this uneasy city... and is left behind when the tour bus departs, with her forgetful husband on board.

That's the beginning of Voyages, a tripartite story of three Jewish women who are immersed in memory trips that measure the Holocaust's ongoing aftershocks. There's mystery afoot everywhere in these journeys; a trick of the eye, and time seems to slip backward. Rivka Adler, the Tel Aviv tourist lost in a graveyard reverie, accidentally missing her transport, might be a revenant from the host of Jews plucked from their lives and abandoned in Hitler's cities of the dead. (Assistant director on Krzystof Kieslowski's Three Colors trilogy, Voyages' Emmanuel Finkiel clearly shares the master's gift for framing and holding on the everyday until it mutates into singular strangeness.)

Later, as Rivka huddles in her cold tour bus, another bus glides up alongside. Like the rest of the passengers, Rivka palms her window clear of condensation. A man--from another time or world?--gazes wearily back at her as though they were somehow kin, his sad, wise face marked by experience too large, too terrible to name. Slowly, as his bus drives on, the vision is wiped away--like a frame in a silent film. And indeed, not much further on in Voyages, Rivka and her fellow travelers become characters in black-and-white movie footage, screened for a Jewish touring club in Paris.

At first, you wonder if Voyages has any plot at all. What's with these half-heard snatches of conversation among tourists, representatives of the great post-war Jewish diaspora? But let yourself go into this film's idiosyncratic itinerary, as it circles around to embrace half a century of transports, "disappeared" families and memories, exile. Allow this haunted journey time to unreel, for it brings home both terrible and wonderful truths about humanity in the aftermath of the unthinkable.

In the second chapter, a French widow receives a phone call from an elderly Lithuanian, who believes he's the father she thought had been gassed in a death camp 53 years ago. Imagine watching your parents carried off by the ultimate bogeymen, living as an orphan all your adult life, and then, long after forgetting's laid it all to rest... resurrection. At night, awakened by the frail old man's snore, she leans close to his face as though to draw some indisputable sign of identity from his very breath, then compares grainy, creased images of her lost father with a passport photo of this new claimant. By the time she's passed judgment on their kinship, it no longer really matters. What counts is the weathered sound of his wavering voice as he croons some long-forgotten lullaby to the little boy who might be his great-grandson.

In Voyages' final journey, an eightysomething Russian babushka has followed her next-door neighbors from Moscow to modern-day Tel Aviv: "I have a mad streak in me!" Searching for her cousin, whom she hasn't seen in 28 years, sweet-faced Vera--with the determination of a snail--makes her slow way around Tel Aviv and its suburbs, climbing on and off buses, crossing busy streets, asking directions in mostly unknown Yiddish. Again, the images suggest a stubborn ghost, out of time but unwilling to miss some vital connection.

The cousins' reunion, when it finally comes in a retirement home, is strong stuff, but somehow too late--the shared experiences that kept love alive between these two women are casualties of failing memory. It's Rivka, Voyages' first vehicle, who returns to witness Vera's visual erasure by a passing bus--underscoring the ease with which an individual, or even a people, can go invisible, forever lost to recall. Voyages testifies to the power of visual art to commemorate our ghosts, to reclaim the moments out of time that define our humanity.