Chris Derek Van | Trois Jours (Three Days) / 2024

the abstraction of ghosts

by Douglas Messerli

 

Chris Derek Van (screenwriter and director) Trois Jours (Three Days) / 2024 [15.30 minutes]

 

Ghosts again seem to be at the center of Van’s French titled effort of 2024. The three days of the title are segmented with the subtitles of “Silence,” “Action,” and “Vie” (“Life”), yet all three seem to recall some horrifying past which left behind the ghost-like figures who haunt all these scenes.

     On the first day we see a boy, evidently named Dave, eating breakfast. Soon after he gets in a car and drives apparently to work. The rooms we see are all shot from within, looking out on the street, and it appears as if Dave’s “office” is merely the lobby of a high-rise Chicago office building where he takes the call of his spectral partner, obviously arising after Dave has left for “work.”

      Their conversation, the only verbal lines of the work, regard the “ghost’” questioning when Dave will be returning home. Dave attempts to explain he’s at work, but we will be back soon. The ghost reports, most disturbingly, that there are other people who live there now, hinting obviously that the apartment where we have witnessed Dave breakfast is now rented or owned by others, Dave having gone off and perhaps never being able to return, leaving his ghost of a lover behind. As the unnamed ghost declares: “I miss you every day.”

   The ghost attempts to watch television, but in the next day is replaced by another man lying in the couch. Day two begins with a view of the office building lobby chairs now empty. Dave, evidently, dead or alive, having moved on. So too is the apartment breakfast table empty—that is until the ghost-like figure again appears, hovering in the background of both the apartment breakfast table and the office lobby. He particularly haunts the apartment where, as I said, another person now is laid out on the couch.

       But here for the first time, we also escape the rooms that so dominated the first day, as we see the lake, a parade of ducks, an observatory, and a large ship anchored near a Ferris Wheel. A couple of boys hover near the water’s edge. Obviously, we can only wonder are these our central figures in another time, a time before their current hauntings of rooms and spaces.

     Van immediately returns us to the heart of downtown Chicago, its busy interchanges and its friendly people which might be said to be the locus of this film. The action, in fact, has nothing apparently to do with our spectral boys.

       At first the apartment seems to be totally abandoned on the third day when we are to discover “life.” But then Dave reappears, this time also as a ghost, with the ghost of his friend wandering the room as well. But after full fields of France’s tricolour, blue, red, and white, we are taken to what might be seen as the opposite of life, a cemetery, where Van’s camera wanders the various grave markings for about 45 seconds before returning to the omnipresent Lake Michigan beside whose waters the second largest US city sits. Of course, as anyone who comprehends time, only death can define a life, just as the great lake helps to define the Chicago city landscape.

      We return to the empty high-rise lobby, again looking from within to the outside and to the empty apartment, with no ghosts this time, but simply the screaming sirens we have heard throughout this short film. A bouquet of flowers on which the camera focuses, the kind sent to commemorate a death, are placed nearby. And again the camera roams the downtown center city streets before seeming to move off toward the rest of the city and its suburbs. Van ends his film in a flurry of abstract circles, obviously based on the large streetlight bulbs strung about the city, symbolizing presumably the circle of life.

       Try as we might to create a narrative, to imagine what happened between these two lovers, we can only fail. Did they break up, with Dave leaving his now ghost-like lover? Did Dave die, leaving his lover alone? Did they both die is some traumatic event, now haunting the places where they once lived full and rich lives? Or is Van simply presenting with the images of the past which haunt every house and street that hasn’t just been newly constructed? There are no answers to be found.

 

     The hauntings of this film, as are its last few imagines, entirely abstract—but no less meaningful for that fact.

 

Los Angeles, August 17, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (May-August 2024).