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Film Review: Nomadland by Chloé Zhao

“The last free place in America is a parking spot” (Bruder, 2017: 14). It might sound like a slogan, but this sentence reveals a central element of Nomadland, that radical spatial reconfiguration which makes it possible for a transitory location, a non-lieu, to become habitable. The film, like the book, repeatedly insists on a meaningful linguistic shift in which we see the nomad not as homeless, but merely as houseless. This sense of dwelling which Heidegger (1971 [1951]) relates also to building, in the sense of cultivating, taking care of our space, both at physical and existential level, and welcoming the interconnections of everything that happens, is reflected in the real and metaphoric journey travelled by the characters in the film, with the construction of community networks, between wants and needs, between the search for freedom and attempts to soothe traumatic wounds. So, Nomadland is made up of the landscape, the road and a story told from a mainly female perspective. The genealogy that led to its production is female too: in 2017, Jessica Bruder published the book-enquiry Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, based on 24 thousand kilometres of field research, travelled in a van and involving meetings and interviews. Actress Frances McDormand bought the rights together with producer Peter Spears and, after watching Chloé Zhao’s second film, The Rider (2017), decided to involve her in the project as co-producer, screenwriter and director. This synergy, this sort of productive flow – which becomes even more remarkable if we think about McDormand’s non-standard attitude towards stardom combined with the sensitivity of a director with Chinese origins who first emigrated to London and then to the States – is visible in the story told, in the mobilisation of imaginaries which are deeply rooted in American culture while also tracing movements, drifts which boldly map potential new trajectories. And this is evident in the relationship between the landscape, particularly the mythical scenery we associate with westerns, and the female figure. At a crucial point in the film, in which the two come together for a brief instant, Dolly (Melissa Smith), sister of the main character Fern (Frances McDormand), tries almost to justify her sister’s decision to live a nomadic life, identifying it as a progression of the mythical story of the American pioneers (“I think Fern’s part of an American tradition”). Film review