*This piece is part of our Critics In Conversation series, where two writers offer different perspectives on the same film. Read Nancy Liu’s review here, and Omar Reyes’ review here.*
Documentarians and journalists bump up against issues of subject identification when crafting certain kinds of stories. There are numerous political and personal reasons why a source may wish to remain anonymous when their story is publicized: the legal repercussions of their testimonies can have devastating consequences. Yet the tension inherent in these kinds of circumstances is paradoxical—some of the most vital stories are the ones that people fear telling the most, yet their impact and legitimacy are questionable when witnesses and whistleblowers decline to go on the record.
In Flee, Danish/French documentarian Jonas Poher Rasmussen attempts to circumvent these challenges with a bold, unconventional approach to nonfiction storytelling: animation. By stylizing his story in this unique medium, the film protects its central subject, an Afghani refugee by the pseudonym of Amin Nawabi. It’s a decision that theoretically allows Amin personalize his narrative in more vivid detail than if he actually appeared on camera, and also provides more emotional vulnerability than anonymous testimonies ordinarily permit.
It’s a fantastic idea on paper, but continually falls flat in execution. The film takes its unique position as neither fish nor fowl, which could be an exciting advantage, and warps it into a weakness. Amin’s story should be a disarmingly moving one—he’s separated from his family as a child and is circumstantially forced to pretend that they’re dead to protect his legal status in Denmark, all while navigating his sexuality along the way. He’s full of complex emotions and difficult inner conflicts, but some combination of Rasmussen’s interview techniques and the animation style fails to translate his internal struggles into externally meaningful art.
The ultimate issue that plagues the film is a lack of detail, which leads to a lack of emotional investment. Rasmussen is old friends with Amin, so he allows the subject to tell his life story on his own terms. But the filmmaker neglects to push his friend to elaborate on the vast majority of his experiences, so the film depicts them with a minimalism and distance that severely limits its emotional resonance. In a climactic scene, Amin tells interrogating immigration authorities that his family died, and that he’s all alone. “I’m sobbing,” he says, “The damn story really hits me, even though it’s not true.” That’s a fascinating starting point for a scene because it provokes a number of questions about the narrator. Why is this fake story so affecting? Are his tears completely sincere, or is he amplifying them as a persuasive technique? Is he imagining what it would feel like if the story happened to him, or empathizing with other unknown refugees who it actually happened to? But the scene abruptly ends after barely getting started, and though the film doesn’t owe the audience answers to any of these questions, it should at least ask questions instead of rushing through each of Amin’s major traumas and turning points. Pretty much all of the scenes play out in this fashion: Amin vaguely describes the general outline of a chapter in his life, and the director allows him to proceed without extrapolating any specific feelings, ideas, or textures that can be translated into compelling cinema.
The dominant animation style doubles down on the narrative’s weaknesses. Whether it’s due to budgetary constraints or intentional artistic choice, the visual aesthetic is decidedly minimalistic—and its particular strain of minimalism is both ugly and bland. Every character’s face is almost identical, and there’s very little motion in most scenes—characters usually sit completely still, and there’s rarely an instance where two people are moving simultaneously, which makes the occasional movement feel even slower. It is so distractingly choppy that it feels like a display error on the projector or screen on which you’re watching. The three-dimensional gradient of the lighting in many scenes also completely clashes with the two-dimensional characters, and the background art fails to deliver many objects or landmarks that enhance the sense of environment. The only animation moments that succeed are those in a completely different, more abstract style that occasionally depict the most emotionally distressing sequences—and both styles of animation look jarring next to one another, and even more jarring when intercut with live-action archival newsreel footage.
Despite its noble intentions, Flee is a failed experiment that lacks both style and substance. Rasmussen’s refusal to ask tough questions makes him a compassionate friend but a borderline-incompetent documentarian, and the minimalist animation only adds to the film’s feeling of lifelessness. It’s the rare film that is inhibited by its director’s personal closeness to its subject matter.