Author: Redmond Bacon

The 75th Locarno Film Festival: dark films for dark times

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

Something happened this Locarno Film Festival that never happened to me at a film festival before. Not only did I see the Golden Leopard winner, but it was actually my favourite film of the festival! Julia Marat’s provocative and fascinating Rule 34 (pictured above) — anchored by a great performance by Sol Miranda as a legal student moonlighting as a camgirl — deservedly received the top honour, which importantly contains a 75,000 CHF prize. Basically on parity with the Euro, it’s probably enough to last you half a year in Switzerland.

But Switzerland, despite the obscene prices, is a very nice place for rich people to retire. So many iconic people move there in the latter stages of their lives. James Joyce died in Zurich in 1941. Tina Turner moved there in 2013. Patricia Highsmith — commemorated in Loving Highsmith (Eva Vitija) in the Panorama Suisse section — literally died directly in Locarno in 1995, while Douglas Sirk is buried in nearby Lugano.

I didn’t hear “The Best” blasting across the Piazza Grande, but in two nice moments of serendipity, my wife sat in our hotel room reading the Ripley novels while I used some free time to check out the Douglas Sirk retrospective. Both novelist and filmmaker have been long gone, but their influence on our present popular culture is unabating.

All That Heaven Allows

And I truly needed some Sirk to counteract the programming at Locarno (covered both by myself and my colleague John Bleasdale), which, although bold and fascinating as usual, veered deeply towards the darker parts of human interaction. Starting with a deepfake exploration of dictators stuck in purgatory thanks to Alexander Sokurov’s competition entry Fairytale, continuing with the war-as-stasis theme in the endlessly repetitive Sermon to the Fish (Hilal Baydarov), and ending with a three-hour tribute to passivity with Tales of the Purple House (Abbas Fahdel), the Concorso Internazionale looked at the present moment and decided there is incredibly little we can do about it, either on a personal level or a political one.

And from the first and second feature competition Concorso Cineasti del presente: the deeply dark tale of Astrakan (David Depesseville, pictured below) — luring one into a simple coming-of-age story before cruelly stealing that childhood away in a triumph of style and beauty in service of narrative ugliness; Arnold is a Model Student, an oddball school satire that doubles up as authoritarian critique; and the suicidal fixations and societal breakdowns of Safe Place (winner of Best Emerging Director in Juraj Lerotić and Best Actor Award in Goran Marković). Some optimism might’ve been found in Before I Change My Mind (Trevor Anderson, pictured bottom) — a pleasant enough coming-of-age story — but it was too slight to make a difference. First time directors might want to make their mark with tragic stories, but piling them on top of each other made for a brutal experience. The programming choices were rarely safe, but they could’ve done with some stylistic variation. It asks the key question: why do comedies so rarely play in competition?

Astrakan

I know the world is a dark place right now — war, droughts, inflation, etc — but some optimism wouldn’t go amiss. That’s why I was so happy to see Rule 34, a film that doesn’t just ask questions but actually explored some answers, take the top prize, showing that even in a country such as Brazil, ruled by someone as incompetent and quasi-fascist as Jair Bolsonaro, pushing back is possible.

Meanwhile with Douglas Sirk, we get an unambiguously happy, norm-breaking ending in the form of Take Me To Town (1953) — a peppy comedy-western filled with glorious costumes and brilliant musical numbers — and the complexity of society’s prejudice pushed back against in All That Heaven Allows (1955, pictured up top), an incredible revelation beamed in 35mm.

Sadly, I cannot claim to have “discovered” Douglas Sirk, a director almost everyone in the film industry admires for his savage satire, dynamic use of light, and elegant blocking. All That Heaven Allows, for example, was prefaced by Todd Haynes fully geeking out about his favourite director. Nonetheless, experiencing his films on the big screen has completely transformed my opinion of his work, which I previously admired but never really counted among my top directors. Now its blindingly obvious that his melodramas are some of the finest art committed to screen. It’s just sad that it’s almost a completely lost form, as realism — and almost all of the competition entries were rooted in capturing a sense of “authenticity” — takes over as the most “serious” art form.

Before I Change My Mind

Still, if the films themselves were miserablist, the experience of Locarno remains as enjoyable as ever; whether it’s walking through the quaint, buzzing old town during the day or night, sitting in the dark screen of the Teatro Kursaal, discussing films with like-minded folk, or even enjoying a negroni or two from the Campari Lounge (great choice of sponsor!). And the true magic of a film festival was found in a ramble to Ascona — ducking out of the Pardo Di Domani party, we discovered a bar where the owner Salvatore turns paper into cigarettes and lighter fire into pearl necklaces. Roaring back to full normal life after last year’s light-touch coronavirus controls, these kinds of moments displayed the true value of being physically present at a film festival. Locarno, irregardless of the offerings themselves, is always a pleasure; hopefully next time I can rave a little bit more about what’s actually on show.

Read all of our Locarno Film Festival coverage now.

Tales of the Purple House (Hikayat elbeit elorjowani)

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During lockdown I tried to learn Russian. It wasn’t a success. My wife tried to make her own bread. It was definitely a success. Abbas Fahdel made an epic three-hour documentary. It’s a mixed success.

Both a video essay depicting painter Nour Ballouk (and Abbas Fahdel’s wife) living during the coronavirus pandemic, and a portrait of Lebanon coming apart at the seams due to the legacy of wars with Isreal, the Syrian refugee crisis, and chronic mismanagement by the government, Tales of the Purple House is both a sweeping, ambitious panorama and an endless series of cutesy YouTube videos.

And just like YouTube’s popularity, a significantly large part of Tales of the Purple House, relies on Nour’s several cats. They chase after mice, scamper after lizards, attack each other and love lounging about. Cats are considered holy, clean animals in Islam, and a metaphor for humanity at large; we are reminded by the owner of a dog shelter that how you treat your animals will determine your fate in the afterlife.

But if the cats in Lebanon are treated well, the people are left behind by constant blackouts, ammunition depots exploding, a depleting currency and skyrocketing inflation. We see protests all across the country, and people getting incredibly frustrated. Everyone except for Nour, who seems to take the closing of borders and the constant presence of death all in her stride.

She is an incredibly passive person, constantly observing and painting the world while it goes on without her input. After all, painting a landscape cannot alter it, neither can filming it. Neither do the many anti-government songs appear to have pushed Lebanese society in the right generation. She even admits at one point, evoking Kirsten Dunst in Melancholia (Lars Von Trier, 2011), that if the world was to end in a week, she would go about almost exactly the same routine.

She is upset with the way the world is, but this frustration never seeps into the movie, which almost seems to accept the status quo and the idea that things will only ever get worse. She is a privileged woman, able to get gas for her car on the black market and never suffers from a blackout. It’s surely one women’s philosophy, almost touching on Buddhist teachings, and it’s interesting to observe, but it gets exasperating and won’t make much impact on the state of things in Lebanon.

The film gets even stranger considering how staged some of the conversations feel — from Nour interacting with her Syrian neighbour, a young boy who likes to kill snakes and help his elders out for free, to her visit to a refugee camp, the likes of which feels rather self-congratulatory. Additionally, Fahdel himself, despite being Nour’s husband and probably experiencing lockdown and the refugee crisis and many other issues along with her, never inserts himself into the movie, making this documentary feel even more artificial.

Neither a fly-on-the-wall slice of observation, or a political polemic, Tales of the Purple House comes across as an arthouse video project that got out of hand and ballooned into 184 minutes. And while there’s nothing wrong with video diaries or movies over three hours, it lacks the kind of internal rhythm or perspective that would make the film sing. Too personal to be universal while too vague to be intimate, it’s a fascinating lockdown project, and a solid capsule of our current era, but it’s unlikely to make an impact outside of hardcore documentarian circles. All in all, a massive lost opportunity.

Tales of the Purple House plays in the Concorso internazionale section of the Locarno Film Festival, running from 3-13th August.

Safe Place (Sigurno mjesto)

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The name is ironic. Bitterly so. There are certainly no safe places in Safe Place, a realist, grim and unrelenting exploration of man’s inner darkness and the difficulty of lifting up those who succumb to it. A confident debut from director Juraj Lerotić, it’s a harsh and unforgiving experience, all the more brave for tackling its central tragedy straight on.

The opening expresses the universality of the topic. The film starts on an inauspicious Zagreb housing block, with kids playing in the car park and other people going about their day. Suddenly, a man bursts into the frame, runs across the car park and breaks the door down. In one of many rapid shifts in this film — which toys with temporality, reality, and our sense of space to excellent effect — we see Demir (Goran Markovic) on the floor, just about clinging on after a suicide attempt. He is cradled by his brother (Juraj Lerotić himsef), who waits until the ambulance arrive.

This is the start of many intense and dark scenes, as we follow Demir being moved between hospitals and police stations, going missing and returning again, unable to express his trauma and refusing to get any better. Played with total passivity by Markovic, he is a man on a mission to die. Neither a veteran of the war or, as he puts it, “a starving child in Africa”, he nonetheless seems unable to see the positive side of life. It doesn’t help that the doctors, police officers and other officials seem unbothered by his problems, creating a further feel of total alienation.

There is a Romanian New Wave feeling to this movie, both in its exploration of bureaucracy, and its moments of pitch-black comedy, as well as the way it always keeps us in the moment, closely observed by the camera, which rarely goes for flashy movements or extraneous gestures. The most obvious similarity in its depiction of an uncaring state is The Death of Mr Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, 2005) as well as Aurora (2010), where Puiu, like Lerotić maintains complete auteur control by playing the main character. Meanwhile, its unrelenting one-thing-after-another approach brings to mind Pilgrims (Laurynas Bareiša, 2021), and might even be able to match that Latvian film’s moderate success.

Despite these Eastern European influences or similarities, there are certain breaks that feel like Lerotić’s own, including a willingness to toy with the reality of what we are watching, inserting purposeful breaks in our understanding of the narrative and moments of gentle surrealism. Some many find this a frustrating and slow watch, but I found mesmerising and hypnotic moments within the unremitting darkness. Suicide is a terrible thing and disproportionately affects young men, who are often unable to talk about their feelings. Sometimes someone has to tell it like it is.

Safe Place (Sigurno mjesto) plays as part of Concorso Cineasti del presente at Locarno Film Festival, running from 3-13th August.

Fragments From Heaven

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The desert, in its bleak, existential emptiness, offers man the chance to discover his destiny. There’s a reason Moses didn’t travel through lush vegetation and rolling hills for 40 days. There’s nothing, nothing, nothing before suddenly something. Something quite remarkable indeed. Perhaps the origin of all human life.

My opening oversells Fragments From Heaven somewhat, a poetic, if slight, documentary from Morocco with two complimentary strands: firstly, the story of Mohamed, a nomad who pursues the desert for meteorite debris, believing it has the power to change his life, and Abderrahmane, a scientist who is exploring the origin of these rocks in order to answer questions about the Big Bang itself. Combining long takes with ambient sound design, and heated discussions with Terrence Malick-style voiceover, this documentary takes you on a quest, touching on topics both scientific and existential.

There are shades of Werner Herzog’s recent geographically-minded documentaries here, such as Into The Inferno (2018) and Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds (2020) — looking at the physical world in order to understand the man-made one. But Adnane Baraka’s film — which he shot, edited, and sound-designed himself — has no conventional talking heads and a much smaller scope and budget, keeping its perspective relatively close. It begs to be seen in a cinema, considering the experiential duration of the desert-set takes, following characters around as they look for these rare meteorite fragments. At home on a computer screen, your attention may easily wane.

We learn back in Abderrahmane’s research centre, that not only are these fragments potentially millions of years old, but they actually pre-date the sun itself. At one point, we even learn that some fragments have organic matter on them, briefly begging the question that there may be life elsewhere in the universe. In one discussion with his students, he even argues that understanding these fragments could be the key to understanding how the universe began. Given the importance of the work, someone needs to give this man more funding right away!

He is the classic scientist, speaking French, while Mohamed, speaking Amazigh, working on the ground with his wife and children, is far more religious-minded. And while the two subjects never meet, they do seem to be in dialogue with one another, creating an interesting tension between faith and science. Perhaps the final answer still resides in the stars?

Ending with a Tree Of Life-like (Terrence Malick, 2011) evocation of the sun burning and lights flaring and fire piercing the cosmos, Baraka finally aims for profundity and awe — reminding us of the infinite potential of the universe around us, small shards of which are more likely to collect in the Moroccan desert than almost anywhere else on earth. Nonetheless, these moments do come after plenty of ponderous takes. There is a lot to think about, but a lot of wading through the desert is needed to get there.

Fragments From Heaven plays as part of Concorso Cineasti del presente at the Locarno Film Festival, running from 3-13th August.

Before I Change My Mind

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We never find a genuine answer to whether Robin (played by non-binary actor Vaughan Murrae) is a boy or a girl. It begins with them walking into their new classroom during a sexual education class: boys on one side, girls on the other. They sit purposefully in the middle, prompting derision from their peers.

The year is 1987. The country is Canada. The state is Alberta. Robin is an odd USA transplant adapting to a new life across the border. And while non-binary and trans people have existed since the beginning of humanity, schools in the era of homophobic John Hughes films and the weird homoeroticism of Top Gun (Tony Scott, 1986) don’t quite have the language to make Robin seamlessly fit in. When they join the saxophone ensemble, the teacher kindly says they can be whoever they want before handing them yet another saxophone: that’s the only instrument the school has.

Thus begins a coming-of-age story that is fresh in its representation but mostly derivative in every other aspect, a curious Locarno inclusion that would’ve felt much more at home in Berlinale’s generation section. Robin meets both boys and girls, develops intense crushes and gets into fights and gets bullied and fights back and sensitively draws the world around them. This is all shot in pastel colours with a handheld camera, sometimes inserting grainy VCR footage to immerse you in the era. The music is suitable synth-heavy too, although none of the needle cuts (Canadian bands?) are particularly memorable, probably due to budget issues.

And while some films might use their 80s setting of a way of easing you into a particular vibe, from Stranger Things (Duffer Brothers, 2016-) to Call Me By Your Name (Luca Guadagnino, 2018), Before I Change My Mind embraces its 80s tropes to the point of parody. Take West Edmonton Mall — the coolest 80s place on earth, a land where you can buy your multicoloured hairbands and leggings before going on a rollercoaster. Later, in perhaps a meta-commentary on the film’s music royalty budget, we are treated to a knock-off version of Jesus Christ Superstar — Mary Magdalene Video Star, an irreverent mash-up of 80s tropes that’s painfully cringe while actually surprisingly well-composed.

But this 80s vibe also allows for generic depictions of youth as well: the tree house in the forest, cycling around the suburbs, reading through porno mags, watching a VHS, and other tropes that have been played out hundreds of times. It’s certainly a pleasurable watch, thanks to solid performances from the kids in the film and the sensitivity with which their issues are handled, but nothing ever felt quite urgent or particularly intellectual. Non-binary and trans kids might welcome a film that is finally about them — especially at a time when schools report more children comfortably not slotting into a gender — but on an emotional and aesthetic level, there is nothing too special here.

Before I Change My Mind plays as part of the Concorso Cineasti del presente section of Locarno Film Festival, running from 3-13th August.

Rule 34 (Regra 34)

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Who says you can’t do it all? Simone (Sol Miranda) is a young Black bisexual Brazilian woman with two very different professions. During the day she is studying to be a public defender, protecting the most vulnerable in contemporary society; by night, she is a cam girl, performing sex acts on camera for male attention. Just by existing, she is everything Jair Bolsonaro hates.

The title shows that anything is possible, even in a country where culture is under attack by bigots like in Brazil. Rule 34 is an internet rule that if you think of something, there will be a pornographic depiction of it online (feel free to close this browser and try it yourself!). People like Simone, although often neglected, genuinely exist, and they deserve their own cinematic portrait.

The good news is that we get a cracking, sparkling, discursive and compelling character study with Julia Murat’s film, examining the boundaries of consent, what it means to seek pain, and the intersection of systemic oppression and personal choice. Simone herself is on a mission to decolonise her own depiction as a black woman online, arguing that much Black BDSM depiction has connotations of slavery. This is linked to the wider difficulties that Black people face in Brazil, as well as women and minorities.

Instead of a simple polemic however, Murat treats us to a film that pushes back against boundaries, while never settling for easy answers. Discussions between the law students are emboldened and intellectual, with few stupid questions and answers, breaking down simple binaries of black/white, male/female, endlessly looking for the grey areas that the law — by its structural nature — cannot find its way around.

But if the law cannot provide closure or liberation, perhaps sex can. Simone is in a ménage à trois with two of her fellow students, male and female alike, freely showing what can happen when people are informed of what they want to do with their own bodies. Murat makes some bold choices here, displaying full-frontal nudity, asphyxiation, spanking and choking; the likes of which could easily be exploitive in the hands of another director. All the time, however, Simone is looking to push the boundaries, resulting in a spiky feminist film that is both exciting to watch and thought-provoking at the same time.

At the centre is Miranda herself, who has no difficulty holding the attention of the camera as the film intuitively edits between different moments of her life, showing the full, complex spectrum of her character. At one point, she just sits alone and eats what appears to be an onion. It should be a kind of throwaway scene, but in the hands of an actor this assured, it had me strangely compelled. The kind of performance that can change the entire tenor of a film, it’s no wonder Murat chooses to end the film on a close-up. With a face that cinematic, it would be rude not to.

Rule 34 Locarno Film Festival plays as part of the Concorso internazionale at the , running from 3-13th August.

Sermon to The Fish (Balıqlara xütbə)

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Even if you win a war, what do you gain? Many soldiers have died, the economy is adversely affected and the remaining people have to live with survivor’s guilt. This is the question Sermon to The Fish, an Azeri film set in the aftermath of the war with Armenia in Nagorno-Karabakh, grapples with, a sincere arthouse attempt to depict the way war rots you from the inside, both figuratively, and also quite literally.

It’s a slow and static film, shot in the mountain and the desert, filled with silence, foreboding landscapes and characters taking their time to move from A to B. The oil fields are still pumping, but the lakes are drying up; the fish of the title seem to have disappeared alongside most of the men Not much happens in between, director Hilal Baydarov taking a contemplative approach in depicting his protagonists mired in endless stasis.

Davud (Orkhan Iskandarli) has returned from the war. If he was happy about the victory, he never shows it on his face, which is set to permanent resignation. His sister (Rana Asgarova) tells him that everyone else in the village has completely rotted, a metaphor for the way war impacts even those who claim to be victorious. She is equally sad, narrating the tale in a somber tone, the film infused with a religious, reverent feeling. As it progresses, she slowly covers up more of her body, the tenets of Islam interacting with a sense of self-loathing to an interesting degree, the subtleties of which may have been lost on me.

As a technical exercise, there is a lot to enjoy in this feature. The use of surround sound evokes memories that aren’t there but cannot be escaped, from the chatter of now dead soldiers to the bombs and gunfire of battle. We are immersed in the world of these characters, often shot The Searchers-like (John Ford, 1956) through windows, tiny shafts of light against an otherwise compressed and black frame. But beauty and craft alone cannot power what is often a repetitive and uninteresting text, relying entirely on its poetic framework to carry the experience. The long takes, especially the stunning final shot, are highly impressive, but there’s nothing here that couldn’t have been told in a more compact short film.

Baydarov has created a brave, critical film, scrubbing away nationalism to see what is left for day-to-day people after going through such difficult experiences. It will probably never play in Azerbaijan itself, but should have a modest festival run. Nonetheless, the inertness of the characters certainly seeps into the film itself, which shows little signs of life. While the characters often stay fixed in frame, like they are posing for a life drawing, a dog bounds in and out of the frame. Whether he has been trained or is simply reacting like a dog to the events of the film, he is the one source of animation and emotion that kept me invested in the film’s long, static stakes. Perhaps it helps that he doesn’t know about the war.

Sermon to the Fish plays in the Concorso internazionale section as part of the Locarno Film Festival, running from 3-13th August.

Astrakan

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Astrakan — or, as I would call it, The 400 Woes — had me asking lots of interesting questions: where does the line between a chronicle end and a narrative start; how do diverse individual scenes actually accumulate into a final picture; and what is the line between representing something awful and genuinely exploiting the people in the story? Simply put, it had me asking lots of questions as I was never invested in the story, which ranges from slow to frustrating to ultimately sickening. There’s a lot of craft there, but the final result is really all over the place.

A thoroughly depressing picture that eschews genuine sensitivity in favour of a series of seriously unfortunate events, Astrakan is the kind of coming-of-age story that strains painfully for profundity but has such an over-abundance of ideas, images and things it wants to say, its forced pathos left me both bemused and repulsed.

It concerns a young boy named Samuel (Mirko Giannini), a foster child living with his adopted family in rural France. Ostensibly seen as a problem child, he is berated for his silly games and the fact he cannot seem to defecate naturally, often soiling his pants. That’s the first of many uncomfortable details that Astrakan — seemingly named after a type of lamb wool as opposed to the Southern region of Russia — revels in, subjecting Samuel to more pain and torture than any French person since Joan of Arc.

He meets a girl. She shows him porn. He goes to the cinema. He gets beaten up by guys we have never seen before. He goes skiing. He watches his teacher have sex with an Olympic skier. He throws up. He has more issues with going to the toilet. He is misunderstood and beaten with a belt while thrown between families and people he really shouldn’t be trusted with. The scenes are often randomly strung together, revealing little narrative cohesion while episodically stale and un-compelling.

He’s both your average 12-year-old and an enigma, revealing nothing, a poor wretch that we watch try and find something to enjoy in his poor life. A real child actor has been put in this position to depict these actions. It made me wonder whether putting a child in such scenes — however sensitively they might’ve been handled — is ever worth it. Certainly not when the finished product feels so irredeemable.

David Depesseville, working with cinematographer Simon Beaufils, is a fine image-maker; shooting on film, his depiction of rustic, untamed France brings to mind Maurice Pialat, often contrasting Samuel against an epic landscape with little hint of regular civilisation. We get the sense this is a land with its own rules, filled with hard people, living difficult lives. And his sense of observation is both keen — from a note being passed from child to child from a birds-eye-view to close-ups of bread being cut to small items being smartly hidden — and over-laboured, spinning into the surreal through unwittingly absurd cutting.

Things then really spin into left-field with the final reveal, a fantasia shot to the sounds of Bach’s St Mathews Passion, calling to mind everything from the mass murders of The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) to Andrei Tarkovsky’s poeticism to Terence Malick’s mysticism. It’s a neat calling card from the second-time director: a statement that he can also do this as opposed to merely layering on naturalist misery-porn. But once it reveals that this already sad story has an even deeper sadness behind it, like the whole thing is one sad onion with bottomlessly sad layers, this technical ability is ultimately wasted in the service of something absolutely no one needs to see. Miserable.

Astrakan has just premiered at the 75th Locarno Film Festival.

Arnold Is a Model Student (Arnon pen nakrian tuayang)

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Schools are paradoxical places: you learn about the benefits of democracy in a place which is essentially a dictatorship. The virtues of free speech and debate are praised in a world where you have to stick to a strict regimen and follow the rules otherwise you will be suspended or expelled. Additionally, as a young person, you are not even allowed to vote yet, meaning that while you learn about the freedom of the world around you, your impact on it is severely limited.

But in countries with an authoritarian bent, such as Thailand, which is a constitutional monarchy that allows no criticism of the King whatsoever and was ruled by a military junta until 2019, school doesn’t necessarily seem to contrast against the government itself; in fact, it compliments it. Within an authoritarian system, teachers are able to wield strict control over their students while the rot of corruption quickly seeps in.

It’s within this world that we meet the titular Arnold (Korndanai Marc Dautzenberg). Recently returning from an exchange in the USA, he is both a smart student — recently winning a maths olympiad — and a smart-aleck, feeling himself above and beyond the rest of his Thai contemporaries while sometimes toying with the idea of making of a difference. Like many coronavirus-set films recently, his rebellious streak is best complimented by the fact he rarely wears his mask, as well as taking naps in class and talking back to teachers. Think Max Fischer with a bald head and a passive attitude to life.

Director Sorayos Prapapan eases us into the material, giving us a great sense of school life — from the girlish games to the minutiae of classroom lessons to the boys sneaking in drinks in the backyard — before weaving in two distinct plot-lines: the rebellion of the students against corporal punishment in school — inspired by the real Bad Student movement in Thailand — and Arnold’s new job working for an exam-cheating service. Armed with exceptional talent, Model Student asks whether it’s worth trying to make a genuine difference within the system or to try and exploit it for your own ends.

If the two plot-lines don’t intersect as satisfyingly as they should, it suits the distanced, often-resigned tone of the film. Using static, planimetric frames, allowing the angles of the school building to intersect with the camera at 90 and 45 degree angles, the film has an ironic detachment that recalls the work of Aki Kaurismäki and Roy Andersson more than South Asian cinema. But Prapapan isn’t a slave to his own style either, knowing when to move the camera, switch to handheld, or insert some comic sound effects (which shouldn’t work but somehow do). The final result is an easily watchable satire that shows great confidence from a first-time feature director, as well as the kind of raw sincerity that often gets smoothed away by someone’s second and third films. It will be fascinating to see how this style is developed in further features. I hope there will be many.

Arnold is a Model Student runs as part of the Concorso Cineasti del presente section of Locarno Film Festival, running from 3-13th August.

Fairytale (Skazka)

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Adolf Hitler. Benito Mussolini. Winston Churchill. Joseph Stalin. Between them they were responsible for the deaths of over 100 million people, before, during and after WW2. Great men in the traditional sense, casting a wide influence over Europe that persists until this day. If you put them all through a live-action Dall-E generator and had them talk to one another, you might have something approximating Fairytale, the latest film from legendary Russian director Alexander Sokurov.

This hybrid live-action/animated film — somewhere between the compositing tricks of Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994) and Zelig (Woody Allen, 1983), the uncanny valley of the deepfake WOMBO app and the foggy mysticism of Hedgehog in the Fog (Yuri Norstein, 1975) — is a strange, philosophical wandering through the minds of the 20th century’s most influential and evil men. Equal parts fascinating and beguiling, frustrating and ponderous, it shows Sokurov is still a director unafraid to innovate while moving into the late period of his career.

It begins with Stalin waking up in a black-and-white nether-zone, next to none other than Jesus Christ himself. God’s own son lies in a somnambulant posture, unable to get up. One suspects he took a look at the world after the Second World War and believed a long lie-down was necessary. Stalin instantly tells him to get up, making a nebulous comparison between Christianity and communism. It’s the first of many one-line statements in a film jam-packed with odd aphorisms. Don’t expect genuine insight, but a sustained mood — a universe that is uncanny and provocative, asking the viewer to bring their own feelings to the world Sokurov creates.

Using archive footage of these dictators and placing them in a composited landscape that feels equal parts William Blake and Hieronymus Bosch, we are treated to a world that moves in endless circles. Dante and the opening lines of the Inferno are invoked — as well as the deep dark wood his protagonist finds himself in — but his Purgatorio feels like the bigger influence here, a world where forward or backward movement seems impossible, characters locked in an endless stasis. These men wait and wait for God to provide judgement, seeing if they finally make it into heaven or hell. They make their case in oblique ways, often talking past each other and wearing different uniforms, realising the kind of odd “what-if” situation you never knew you wanted.

The inclusion of Winston Churchill might be puzzling to certain Brits, due to the fact that he helped win the war and is considered a legend by most in the nation, but when you actually reckon with his vile white supremacism — condemned at the time by members of his own party! — and the legacy of the Bengali famine, his inclusion in the film amongst these tyrants does feel warranted. Either way, his British stoicism and endless pining for the Queen — remarkably still alive — provide a neat and humorous counterpoint to the ramblings of his fascist and communist contemporaries. Interestingly, no Americans feature, Sokurov keeping his perspective fully on the European perspective.

Conceived before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there are echoes of modern times throughout. Boris Johnson failed to capture Churchill’s brio, while Vladimir Putin is bringing back the Stalinist era. There is always a problem when the man becomes a symbol of the nation itself, and pursues more and more depraved imperialist goals in the pursuit of endless power. It’s interesting that the masses themselves never seem to fully come into view, morphing together into shadows and waves and making lots of noise while lacking definition. It shows that dictatorial ambition, regardless of political affiliation, only works by seeing the people as a mass, never as individuals, despite the need for a god-like figurehead at the top. But there is only one God, and he has the power to decide everyone’s ultimate fate.

Rejected by Cannes for misguided political reasons — after all, simply being Russian is not a crime — Fairytale is too bizarre to resonate with viewers around the world, but for those interested in WW2 history and the legacy of great men, as well as films that pursue unique cinematic forms, this is certainly a film worth checking out.

Fairytale plays in the Concorso Internazionale as part of the Locarno Film Festival, running from 3-13th August.

Declaration (Ariyippu)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP:LIVE FROM LOCARNO

A naturalist drama that incorporates thriller elements into its slow-burn atmosphere, Declaration shows just how disposable immigrant workers can be. A perceptive work from Malayalam director Mahesh Narayanan, it smartly captures the intersection of class, gender and race-based oppression, showing how an atmosphere of exploitation and corruption hits those at the bottom of the human food chain hardest.

Husband and wife Hareesh (Kunchacko Boban) and Reshmi (Divya Prabha) are from Kerala, in India’s south. They move to the northern state of Uttar Pradesh for a better life. Not only can they find solid work at a disposable glove factory, but they have a better chance of getting their visas approved in order to move abroad. The first images we see are shot on an iPhone, showing Reshmi taking gloves off mechanical hands and putting them in a bucket. This is her skill video, a necessary part of getting her visa application approved. But another, more private video is somehow tacked onto the end of the film, causing a rift between the previously relatively content couple.

The whole film was shot and set during the coronavirus pandemic, which helps to up the sense of paranoia at almost every turn. While no one seems to actually contract the disease, the film makes use of the power dynamics involved with mask-wearing in particularly acute ways: for example, those in charge either choose to forego the mask entirely, wear it under their chin, or have an FFP2 mask instead of the generic blue medical mask. The workers themselves are almost always covered, because they know that the disease would either mean serious health complications or a loss in salary. Coronavirus may seem to infect you no matter who you are or which precautions you take, but the way that you deal with it often depends on your race and class status.

If coronavirus was supposed to be the great leveller, it only really entrenched class privilege all across the world, allowing the rich and powerful to further line their pockets. Marital drama dovetails with the tale of the factory cutting corners, the film slowly accruing details of misplaced and faulty gloves, managers sweeping away inaccuracies and workers blithely uncaring about the quality of the product. Why would they? They’re not even getting paid on time.

If the narrative is relatively straightforward, it’s the way that it’s told that allows complexity to grow in the corners. Narayanan doesn’t necessarily spell out every detail, allowing the camera to linger on certain elements (which I won’t spoil here) to further enrich the hypocrisy that permeates almost every frame. The handheld cinematography and general lack of score immerses the viewer within this realist setting, echoing both the moral dramas of Asghar Farhadi and the class-based consciousness of Ken Loach’s cinema.

While the editing could’ve heightened the stakes in the final act by tightening the tension and removing some fat, the final result is a fascinating drama that makes full use of the coronavirus pandemic — and its attendant measures — as a metaphor for class exploitation.

Declaration plays in the Concorso Internazionale plays as part of the Locarno Film Festival, running from 3-13th August.