By John Noonan
“Aren’t all the great love stories set in the old world?”
FilmInk is catching up with director Gabe Klinger to discuss his latest film Porto; a love story that crosses years and memories within the second largest city in Portugal. Executive produced by Jim Jarmusch, the film stars the late Anton Yelchin alongside French actress Lucie Lucas, as Jake and Mati; two expats who share a passionate encounter one warm European night. After Double Play, a documentary about James Benning and Richard Linklater, this is Klinger’s first foray into fiction.
“There’s just something about the macro and micro of history going on when you set a very personal story in a place like [Porto],” Klinger says, explaining his reasons for choosing the city as the backdrop to his film. “You have these characters with their personal histories and then a city where history is visible everywhere. The place puts you in the right mindset to approach this kind of story.”
Porto offers up three different perspectives of the lovers’ night, none of them being presented as the definitive cut. In addition, Klinger cuts in visits to a future Jake and Mati as they reflect on the past. In a way, Porto opens up how we can often remember and edit the emotional moments in our lives to suit us. Admitting to being somewhat ‘pessimistic’ regarding soul mates, Klinger is, however, interested in how cinema can explore ‘this type of intimate connection.’
“I think it’s possible to be intoxicated by another person to the point where you feel like time and space are transforming around you,” he enthuses. “You have subjective time, the time you experience when you remember something, or dream about something… And yeah, we tend to relive glorious moments over and over in our memory, but we also tend to rewrite those moments, we edit out some of the bad parts… Otherwise living with our past missteps would be intolerable.”
Flicking between the past and present of our onscreen lovers, Klinger incorporates numerous stock and aspect ratios to enhance how a memory is interpreted at any one moment in time. Subdued colours followed by pin sharp visuals give Porto the feeling of a cinematic collage.
“In cinema we tend to limit ourselves to two or three different aspect ratios,” Klinger says. “When it came to telling this story, I wanted to have as many tools as possible to approach the subjective aspect of time/memory that I was talking about. It’s like a painter using finer or thicker brushes. Do you want to go more figurative, do something more immediate? Do you want to create a feeling that’s a little more ambiguous or open to interpretation? Or do you want something more clearly stated? I was a bit greedy and wanted to play with all these things in my first fiction film.”
When talk turns to the two stars of his film, Klinger appears to be genuinely grateful for their part in his story. The director had previously met Yelchin on the set of Joe Dante’s horror comedy Burying the Ex. Describing the Green Room actor as “very thoughtful, and very humble”, Klinger corresponded with Yelchin over the course of a year before actually making Porto. (“His support was unwavering.”) He met Lucas in the casting process and she proved herself to be just as supportive of the project.
“I felt she really understood what we were going for, but then she brought this whole other complex and ambiguous layer to the character,” he explains. “I’d prefer audiences to discover those nuances of her character on their own. But in general, I would have never been able to do this without the skill and confidence that both Anton and Lucie lent to me and the production. I earned so much from them!”
It mustn’t be forgotten that like Francois Truffaut, Gabe Klinger is a critic turned filmmaker, having written for Sight and Sound, as well as Cinema Scope. As we near the end of our time together, we have to ask about how it feels to create your own world and, by extension, open yourself up to analysis.
“It’s tough! When you’re making films at a certain level, I don’t think you care as much. It’s not as fragile,” he admits. “But if you understood all the personal sacrifices we went through to make Porto… it’s our baby. You just want to make sure the movie has the best chance to find an audience, and you want critics to be able to help you to provide the context, the culture around the experience. I’m so damn proud of the work that Anton, Lucie, our cinematographer Wyatt [Garfield], and everyone else did. I feel protective of them. I feel protective of Anton. He loved this movie. He loved his character. And every time I’m at a film festival, I just miss him so much because I know he would have loved to be there to talk to people about it. It’s still so utterly devastating.”
Porto is screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival
