“Somewhere With No Bridges” (2020) Review
Charles Frank’s “Somewhere With No Bridges” turned me into a puddle. It’s a deeply personal, poetic, searching eulogy. Frank’s ruminating documentary investigation looks to unearth the answers to his formative memories in the New England fishing community of Martha’s Vineyard. This delicate, intuitive probe is told with the reverence and grace of Terrence Malick’s “Tree of Life”.
What is it about? It’s searching for the answer to something universal through the hyper-specific. It’s a question that waits in the corner of your subconscious to overwhelm you in an unsuspecting crisis; what will people say about me when I’m gone? Filmmaker Charles Frank (who directs and co-wrote this posthumous investigation with Nico Bovat) returns to Martha’s Vineyard. It is the setting for his earliest memory, his uncle’s untimely death, Richard “Richie” Madeiras.
Haunted and moved by those amorphous memories Frank advertises in the local paper for participants who remember Richie. Much to his surprise, a chorus of colourful real-life characters relishes a chance to tell tales of Richie and recreate a series of interviews that serve as a kind of virtual wake. The interviews are staged with such affecting clarity, black backgrounds and warmth in the lighting show the eyes of interviewees twinkling, the lines on faces as well-earned mileage. The documentary also weaves in family home video footage. There’s a great contrast in the crisp and intimately composed talking head interviews and this moving aged photograph aesthetic.
Instead of the documentary maintaining a rigid structure, the subjects - and Frank’s experience and intuition behind the lens-began to re-shape the film. Those people in Richie’s life with the most substantial connection, the most incredible sense of him, lure the filmmakers towards them. The film is guided by Frank’s observational and wholly unglamorous narration. The exploration of those intimates (Richie’s son and best friend) is captured with visual poetry. This observer finds the skill and the art in the grind of working-class folks weaving boats around traps, mounting submerged rocks to get the best position to cast a line.
It is freeing that the film takes precisely the amount of time required - “Somewhere” comes in at just under an hour. Like the early documentaries of Agnes Varda, Frank lets “Somewhere” tell the filmmakers when it’s done. This coincides with anonymous poem submission to the same local paper in Martha’s Vineyard that he advertised in - the end becomes apparent.
“Somewhere” is a series of questions, why this moment in my life? Why this place? And Frank decides to interrogate the why with a camera. Like “Dick Johnson is Dead” in 2020, “Somewhere” finds a way to repeat the eulogy moment for its subject, Richie. After we’ve heard about Richie, “Somewhere” reveals what it’s about to Frank.
