“Ballast” looks set to be the independent success of the year. Bagging two awards at the Sundance Film Festival this year, the self-financed, self-produced and self-distributed debut feature by director Lance Hammer has been winning praise from notable critics all over the country.
It is always a pleasant surprise to see a film like this gaining recognition; “Ballast” is defiantly non-American in style. Employing a camera readily influenced by European cinema ““ the Dardenne brothers leap to mind ““ the film’s themes of love, grief and loss is, on the other hand, informed by the rich Southern traditions of William Faulkner.
Set in the Mississippi delta, the film tells of a trio ““ a man played by Michael J. Smith Jr., a woman played by Tarra Riggs and her child played by JimMyron Ross ““ finding life after a traumatic incident.
To reveal more would unravel the simple premise on which the film is structured upon. After all, part of the film’s mastery is its withholding and eliding of crucial information that would otherwise make it a conventional narrative.
The film is structured such that we are not entirely sure of what is happening onscreen until the scene is over, or, in some parts, many scenes later. The points at which every scene begins and ends are extremely precise, and follow a set rhythm.
Each shot begins with a character, mid-action, and ends before the action is brought to its close. Not only does this put the audience in a perpetual state of tension, of figuring out what is going on, it also emphasizes the present. It brings out the fleeting gestures in moments ““ instances that pass before we realize their full significance.
Hammer has mentioned in interviews that he had wanted to capture a passing moment of sadness he felt when he first visited the delta.
In his hands, the mythical landscape, which has awed American filmmakers like Terrence Malick and David Gordon Green, becomes a fragmentary space constantly thwarted by disjunctive jump-cuts and handheld camera work.
After the visually splendid opening ““ a shot of Ross’s back as he regards a flock of crows taking flight against the horizon, Hammer does not allow much reverie of his locales. The characters and their story are strictly at the forefront of the frame, and landscape recedes to a backdrop that only hints hazily at the characters’ psychology.
This immediately puts the film in the same league as the Dardenne brothers’ work, to which Hammer owes a large debt to.
While the gutter glamor of the Dardennes’ working-class heroes serve to underscore, however misguidedly, a social commentary of the relentless manufacturing machine behind middle-class Europe, “Ballast” glides over the characters’ poverty and milks them as a basis for drama.
More importantly, where the crises on which every Dardenne film is predicated are strictly sociological, the crisis that propels “Ballast” is an abstract one.
We never find out the origin behind the crisis, only its aftermath. This makes the film a little more accessible than “The Son” or “Rosetta,” but it also makes its Dardenne-inflected ending a little more contrived.