To Exist Under Permanent Suspicion

After Pacific Club, Valentin Noujaïm is now at a second psychogeographic portrait of the gray purgatory that is the La Défense neighbourhood in Paris, climbing, on this occasion, high into the corporate heights of its sky-scrapers. Somewhere between a fashion film, a treatise on urbanism and a De Palma thriller, To Exist Under Permanent Suspicion looks — through the prison-like blinds of the office window — at a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown (a superb Kayije Kagame, Saint Omer, dir. Alice Diop). The pressure is coming from various sides: on the one hand there’s the prejudice of the corporate arena and she is doubly-suspicious (being black, and a woman), on the other there’s the nature of work itself. Noujaïm allegorizes these tensions into a (wo)man vs. building fight, but behind it there peeks the (wo)man vs. system conflict, for the noir-like landscape of these tall glass giants are but the beautiful shell of glossy capitalism. (Dora Leu)