Tag: Astrakan

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.

Astrakan

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM LOCARNO

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.