In “Ghost Trail”, Jonathan Millet’s hypnotic first feature presented at the Critics’ Week, Adam Bessa is impressive as Hamid, a Syrian spy hunting his former tormentor in a dark and dusky Strasbourg. We meet the young actor whose passion for his work shines through.
“When you see the Mona Lisa, it’s immediate, obvious, you don’t even notice the work. When you listen to a Bob Marley song, it’s like a tree, it’s done just as well. The artistic experience is when the spectator no longer sees anything, it must convey a feeling of being bewitched, of being taken into another world.” These words, the last in a long conversation with Adam Bessa a few days before the Critics’ Week opening with Jonathan Millet’s Ghost Trail, shed as much light on the actual, sensory experience of the impressive film as on the actor’s obstinacy at work. Revealed in 2022 in Lotfy Nathan’s Harka, where his magnetic, dark presence radiated in every shot, and for which he was awarded the Best Performance prize at Un Certain Regard, Adam Bessa aspires to a conception of the craft inherited from the ‘studio actor’, like Marlon Brando and Stella Adler, who was according to him “the greatest acting teacher of the 20st century”.
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Taking on and incorporating a character, a human life, “heir childhood, memories, doubts, what they saw, heard, their relationship with parents, friends, college, adolescence, becoming an adult »… These are the intense phases, the layers to be accumulated and then put on like thin clothing, that the actor imposes on himself as rigorous performance. « With Ghost Trail, I did something I’d never done before. I cut myself off from the team, no one spoke to me on the set. » The recurrence of the motif of the revenant in Bessa’s filmography, the way Harka yesterday, Ghost Trail today, highlight characters who are haunted by a troubled and traumatic past, as if coming back from the dead. It’s a ‘signature’. The man himself, who was influenced as a teenager by Basquiat and Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black album, confesses to this, as he is so fond of detecting in others « the past beneath the faces« .
Les Fantômes was therefore practically made for him, although the part wasn’t immediately given him. “they wanted to see Syrians for the part”. It was only after a three-hour meeting that the chemistry between him and Jonathan Millet took hold, « a mutual trust ». Bessa, born near Nice in 1992, learns the gentleness of Hamid, a literature teacher, by reading the Arab poets Rûmî and Khalil Gibran, and the language via voice messages recorded by Syrian actress Hala Rajab and listened to « over and over again, until they became music », a new competence to his quadrilingualism. “Ghost Trail allowed me to make my peace with old demons. Jonathan is an extremely intellectual person, the kind you don’t see much of any more, Tarkovsky-like. There was a world between us when I met him.” His eclectic filmography already includes Sam Hargrave’s blockbuster Tyler Rake, a first film by a young Canadian-Tunisian filmmaker, Mé el Aïn by Meryam Joobeur, an Amazon series with rapper Booba (Ourika) and, soon, a short film which he will direct himself. After years spent in Marseille, a city he adores, but which he feels has been disfigured by gentrification and “the police, everywhere and all the time”, Adam Bessa has settled in Valencia: “I like being in countries where I don’t speak the language, where people have other interests, which always makes you think. Some cities are places you visit, others you live in. Valencia is a place of passage for me. I’m going to continue on my journey.” – Leaving to better return?
Traduction Emma Frigo
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