‘Fugue’: Edinburgh Review

Dirs/scr: Benedicte Lienard, Mary Jimenez. Belgium/France/Netherlands/Peru. 2024. 89 mins.

Drawing on real-life testimony and employing non-professional actors to explore the violent history of homophobia within Peru’s bloody 1980-2000 civil war, Benedicte Lienard and Mary Jimenez’s enigmatic drama becomes an act of remembrance as it travels into the Peruvian Amazon with Saor (Saor Sax). His trip is marked by grief as he accompanies the coffin holding his transgender lover Valentina (Valentina Linares Gonzalez) back to her home village for burial.

 Builds a head of emotional steam

The filmmakers previously collaborated on the documentary Glowing Embers (2013) and the hybrid film By the Name of Tania (2019). Fugue continues in the same vein as the latter, driven more by atmosphere than plot. Lienard and Jimenez lean into the contemplative over the concrete, meaning Fugue will appeal most to those who like their journey into cinema to come with few signposts. Vying for the newly inaugurated Sean Connery Prize at this year’s Edinburgh International Festival, where it has its world premiere, it is likely to enjoy a healthy run on the festival circuit, especially appealing to those with an LGBTQ+ focus.

“I feel like that mad woman haunted by her ghosts,” Saor says in a voiceover that flows through the film and which is chiefly directed at his dead lover. Saor too has a spectral quality as he also drifts almost ghostlike through the spaces of Valentina’s previous life, interacting with those who knew her as Pol. Returning to the hut Valentina once occupied, Saor moves through the shack, arm outstretched as though channelling her energy, his voice invoking her spirit to draw near. A recurrent dog motif, though underplayed, also suggests a mystic element. Occasionally, we’ll dip in and out of Saor’s gauzy memories of Valentina in her incarnation as a club singer, but mostly these arrive more as figments rather than fully fledged flashbacks, adding to the inscrutable air that persists around her.

As Saor meets those from Valentina’s past, it’s as though he psychically tunes into their thoughts. “I listen to the living,” he tells one, gradually divining a history about Valentina he was unaware of and which is more complex and dangerous than he imagined. The monologue voiceover increasingly proves to be a clever choice, as it holds the weight and focus of the story and reduces the need for the non-professionals to deliver lines to one another.

The mood in general is introverted and studiously hushed, resting on Peter Warnier’s sound design rather than a score. Saor’s reveries are largely accompanied by the buzz of insects or creak of floorboards, although the silence is periodically broken by the bolero classic ‘Dos Gardenias’ – a favourite of Valentina’s, which she dedicated to all her lovers, “the trans, gays and versatile ones”.

Cinematographer Virginie Surdej, who also shot By The Name Of Tania, has previously shown great command of light in the likes of Maryam Touzani’s The Blue Caftan (2022) and Adam (2019). Surdej’s measured approach allows us to appreciate the deep greens and inky blacks and violets of the half light, while deliberate blurring of focus draws us closer to Saor’s ruminations and observations.

The quiet nature of the film also makes Saor’s discovery about the violence surrounding Valentina feel stark by contrast. The brutal punishment meted out to those in the LGBTQ+ community by the terrorists is forcefully brought home not by bloody re-enactment, but by Saor’s whispered narration of events. By framing these recollections as something vividly channelled from those who experienced it, Lienard and Jimenez bring home the lingering trauma of conflict, indicating how, afterwards, those who dished out violence have simply become reabsorbed into the everyday fabric of the community. The only overt aggression we bear witness to is that between birds at a cockfight, – a visceral moment but also a subtle reminder of the way all animals can be induced to turn on their own. 

While the drifting quality of Fugue results in perhaps one or two too many lingering shots of Saor contemplating the universe and his place within it, it builds a head of emotional steam rendered all the more poignant by the real-life testimony that underpins it.