Tag: cinema

Sermon to The Fish (Balıqlara xütbə)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM LOCARNO

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.

What to Look Out for at the 75th Locarno Film Festival

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

The Locarno Film Festival returns once again for its 75th edition, providing its characteristic and eclectic mix of arthouse cinema and crowd-pleasing fare. Whether you’re an arduous cinephile or someone just looking for a good time, the cinemas alongside the Lago Maggiore — stretching from the magical Piazza Grande to more intimate indoor theatres — have a little something for everyone.

If 2021 was testing the waters within strict coronavirus protocols, 2022 promises to be even more relaxed, fully returning to the traditional hustle and bustle that characterises the joy and discovery of in-person film festivals. Giona A. Nazzaro returns as artistic director for a second year, providing a steady hand to an event steeped in tradition but still committed to pursuing new and exciting art forms.

Consider the contrast between the opening film and my most anticipated competition inclusion. The opening ceremony is yet another American action film, David Leitch’s unavoidable Bullet Train. Starring Brad Pitt as an assassin on a high-speed Japanese rail-line, I have been subjected to the trailer at least 100 times in cinemas; so many times in fact, that it gives off the impression that it simply won’t be very good.

Meanwhile in the Concorso internazionale, legendary Russian director Alexander Sokurov returns after seven years with Skazka (Fairytale) — pictured below. It’s a mysterious hybrid effort blending archive and newly-shot material that comments on both dictators and the fate of the planet. Rejected by Cannes due to political reasons, it sounds like a fascinating experiment that is sorely needed as the Russian state is slowly collapsing.

Skazka

If Sokurov is the big name on the arthouse scene, the other directors in the competition are unknown to me, stretching from Italy to Brazil to Indonesia. All promise fascinating perspectives: there is a COVID-19 immigrant drama in the form of Mahesh Narayanan’s Ariyippu; a study of toxic masculinity in Bowling Saturne (Saturn Bowling); sea-bound drama in Human Flowers of Flesh; and a look at modern faith in the Austrian Catholic boarding school film Serviam – Ich will dienen (Serviam – I Will Serve).

More populist efforts can be found back on Piazza Grande with the Daisy Edgar-Jones starring Where the Crawdads Sing (which I’ll save for streaming) and My Neighbor Adolf, which, yes, sounds exactly like its title suggests. For those more interested in cinematic history, Douglas Sirk’s exquisite Imitation of Life (1958) plays on 35mm (as part of a wider retrospective), while New Wave-heads can get their kicks with Laurie Anderson’s 1986 Avantgarde concert movie Home of the Brave.

It’s usually around the edges that a festival truly comes to life. (Last year, my most notable experience was a Peter Greenaway film that didn’t even play officially at the festival.) For first and second-time directors, Concorso Cineasti del presente provides a chance to discover emerging talents, while the truly out there Fuori concorso section promises a zone where cinema is set free from any expectations or tradition.

I never try to read too much into what is playing, enjoying the thrill of the new upon walking into a cinema with little idea of what to expect; making the Locarno Film Festival such a unique experience. I shall be attending between 8th-12th August to report from the frontlines, providing reviews and insights from one of the best film festivals in the world.

The Locarno Film Festival runs from August 3rd to August 13th.

The ugly face of female violence, from the horse’s mouth

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

We first meet the hero of Askar Uzabayev’s latest film, Happiness, standing in front of the mirror. Pulling down her bathrobe to reveal her naked chest and shoulders, illuminated only by candlelight due to regular power outages, she inspects her many bruises. Played by actress Laura Myrzakhmetova, but named archetypically as just “Wife”, she is one of millions of women across Kazakhstan living under the brutal spectre of domestic violence.

This issue is of epidemic proportions. As producer Bayan Maxatkyzy tells me, “Every year, about 400 women die from domestic violence. Only seven per cent of victims report domestic violence, despite nearly one in two women in the country suffering some sort of abuse. And this is just the official data. There could be more.” And with no official law for the protection of victims, “thousands of abusers get away with this crime on a daily basis.”

Maxatkyzy suffered intense domestic abuse herself, but counts herself as one of the lucky ones. She’s a genuine movie star in Kazakhstan, talking to me across Zoom while wearing large sunglasses and sitting on an opulent couch with an expensive-looking handbag in full-view. Rising to fame for her role in the popular 1993 Kazakh melodrama Love Station followed by a successful journalism and acting career, she has four million Instagram followers, more than any other celebrity in the country. So, when her first husband, Bakhytbek Yesentayev, beat and stabbed her four times in 2016, the story became national news, eventually leading to his 9-year imprisonment.

Happiness

Maxatkyzy’s fame give her case widespread attention, but the woman at the heart of Happiness, which recently won the Panorama Audience Award at the Berlin Film Festival, has no such protection. The first half is utterly drenched in sadness and desperation, a culture of misogyny permeating almost every scene. Her daughter (Almagul Sagyndyk) is getting married, yet nobody seems to be celebrating. The perennially drunk Husband (Yerbolat Alkozha) tells the bride-to-be in an embarrassing liquor-sodden speech to “never raise your voice” if she is to be a good wife, displaying a cycle of submissiveness and shame handed down from generation to generation.

When he later rapes his own wife on his daughter’s wedding night, a cardboard cut-out of a beautiful woman wrapped in clingfilm lingers in the background; an ironic contrast of feminine perfection that perhaps represents the ideal, voiceless woman. Despite her tragic home life, the Wife works as an influencer, selling perfume that she promises will give other women happiness.

In her posts, the Wife lays out a rehearsed theory, underscored by Antonio Vivaldi’s “Winter”. She says that happiness is 50 per cent nature, 10 per cent living conditions, and 40 per cent a result of free will. But the reality of the film, imbued with endless beatings, police corruption and sexual menace, lives within that middle 10 per cent, resulting in a horrifying, hard-to-look-away portrayal of living under the fear of death with little chance of state protection.

Both Maxatkyzy and director Askar Uzabayev, who adapted a script co-written with journalist Assem Zhapisheva, avoided state financing models when finding funding for the film. Maxatkyzy crowdfunded $20,000, with many women “sending one, two dollars” to the cause. “As many rich producers are men, and this was [Kazakhstan’s] first movie about domestic violence, they didn’t want to take part. Because they are men,” Maxatkyzy says. “Maybe they just didn’t believe in this project.” Uzabayev also believes the crowdfunding was the right choice. “When the government pay, they tell us what to do, like not showing police corruption,” he says.

The film takes a freewheeling turn by the end, anchored by Myrzakhmetova’s performance. The actress both empowers and teases out the nuances of her unnamed hero, who is neither victim nor a stereotypical “strong woman”. But Myrzakhmetova was not the first choice for the role. In fact, according to Uzabayev, “six candidates before Laura rejected the role. Our last candidate refused to take it two days before we planned to start shooting. In the beginning [the actresses] were inspired, but after discussions with their husbands, they were prohibited from taking this role.”

The film’s overwhelming atmosphere of shame and fear, coupled with the wider, grim context, is a far-cry from stereotypical Hollywood portrayals like The Invisible Man or Promising Young Woman, which can lean more poppy, revenge-laden and digestible. Happiness is so powerful because it doesn’t borrow inspiration from genre cues, such as the meticulously-planned revenge or a final belief in the police to fix the problem, and pursues its own uncompromising, highly distressing path. As Maxatkyzy says, “We didn’t take ideas from American or European movies because our mentality is completely different. Our society is totally patriarchal.” Her hope is that the movie will be widely-seen in order to start a conversation, both in Kazakhstan and further afield: “My intention is that people will remember situations that happened among their own families. I hope the inconvenience that they feel will lead to the realisation that they could take action to change the situation.”

Happiness premiered at the Berlinale. Stay tuned for a wider release.

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All images in this article are stills from ‘Happiness’.

Both Sides of the Blade (Avec Amour et Acharnement)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

To borrow the same metaphor, Both Sides of the Blade is a double-edged sword. On the one hand we have a finely-acted drama minutely detailing the ins and outs of marriage and infidelity; on the other, we have an overwrought and sentimental tale that doesn’t ever compel the audience to sit up in its seat the way the average Claire Denis film usually does. This is a half-baked, disappointing effort from one of our great living directors, all the more of a letdown due to her normally high batting average.

The radiant Juliette Binoche, returning with Denis after Let the Sunshine In (2017),stars as Sara, a woman seemingly secure in her relationship with Jean (Vincent Lindon). The film opens on an idyllic scene, the middle-aged couple swimming in the sea, cuddling and kissing before returning to their Paris apartment and making love. But the music, courtesy of Tindersticks, suggests an erotic thriller; a mash of discordant trumpets and strings portending confusion ahead. For Jean has entered into business with Sara’s former flame François (Grégoire Colin), alighting a moody marital drama that never settles on a consistent and engaging tone.

Denis is known for her highly stylish approach to filmmaking, even when making a so-called “domestic drama”: from Sara’s first sighting of François to a frantic agency opening to the endless arguments with her husband, the camera gets inside her head and creates an appropriate sense of disorientation, further complimented by Denis’ mixture of camera formats. From moment to moment, the dialogue is smart: while on the nose throughout, it allows the couple to test each other, as they debate what François means to them and how he will dominate their lives.

Binoche typically excels in the main role, portraying a woman who knows what she wants, but is afraid of what happens if she gets it. She’s both smart and cunning, sexy and brave, afraid and manipulative, often within the same scene. Even when the story falls short, she finds new dimensions to her character throughout. Lindon rises equally to the game, moving between magnanimity and jealousy, pragmatism and anger, with ease. Together, they keep the lockdown-light drama engaging — with reminders of the coronavirus pandemic throughout and endless scenes shot within their modern Rue D’Amsterdam apartment — throughout each scene despite the failure of the plot, co-written with novelist Christine Angot, to give them any shape to their respective destinies.

But what of François, occupying the Count Vronsky-role in this modern-day Anna Karenina? Wearing a Le Coq Sportif jacket and riding a motorcycle, he’s criminally underwritten; giving us little sense of why he’s such a big deal. Other supporting players, including Jean’s black son and white mother, or a friendly pharmacist, are equally tokenistic, making me feel that the film would be better without them taking part at all. The whole thing is filled with unearned moments, even if the individual craft is fairly sturdy. While by the end you can see from both sides (of the blade) now, it’s that crucial third side that needs further sharpening. Or even better, a much sharper knife.

Both Sides of the Blade played in Competition at the Berlin Film Festival, running from February 10th to the 20th. On all major VoD platforms in December.

Flux Gourmet

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

In-fighting, flatulence and freaky food is all on the menu in Flux Gourmet, the latest offering from oddball auteur Peter Strickland. Conjoining his pet themes — the meaning of compromise, deep dives into noise, and the way sex is used as a weapon — into one culinary package, it’s further proof of his unique, uncompromising style. While not reaching the heights of The Duke of Burgundy (2015), it’s a strangely amiable comedy that might not provoke any belly laughs, but kept me wryly smiling throughout.

It occupies a realm between what I’d term horror-light — taking the giallo-lighting, penchant for gore and rapid zooms the genre is often-known for — and light-fantasy, set in an institute dedicated to the fusion between cooking and music. Heading a “band” taking up residency for an undefined amount of time in this location is Ella (a brilliantly prickly Fatma Mohamed), berating her colleagues Billy (an emo Asa Butterfield) and Lamina (a more straight-laced Ariane Labed) for not following her vision to the letter. Soon the band find themselves butting heads with the institute leader, excellently played by Gwendoline Christie. She wears so much black-eyeliner that she resembles a panda.

The film betrays its left-field approach to storytelling early on, when the narrator, Jan Stevens (Makis Papadimitriou), a Greek journalist tasked with documenting this collective, complains of gastric turbulence. There is something wrong with his intestine, leading him to constantly hold in farts. This means that he’s perennially uncomfortable, making his job chronicling the various disagreements within the band incredibly difficult. Their pursuit of culinary performance perfection is later complicated by various rifts between the group, including the sly machinations of the institute leader and a rogue collective previously rejected from the institute lingering menacingly around the edges.

Strickland does a great job of establishing and interrogating the unique personalities of all the players, giving us a TV series worth of content within just two hours. These aren’t just types, but people with their own hang-ups and neuroses, not easily solvable within the confines of a movie. Repetitive moments — from the teams synchronised wake-up to their morning walks to crucial “after-dinner speeches” — give us the full overview of each central character, allowing us to see the story from a variety of different perspectives. One could easily imagine a longer-form adaptation with a different collective appearing each episode.

This is definitely true when it comes to the actual art at the heart of the film, developing Strickland’s obsession with noise as previously seen in The Berberian Sound Studio (2012). I wanted more: from the crackle of fresh food hitting the pan, to the boiling of water, to the crack of an egg opening, hearing conventional kitchen sounds blown up to surround sound is a true auditory delight. But beyond a running joke about a flanger ruining their performance and generic droning sounds, the actual mechanics of the music is left sorely unexplored.

And when the “wind” does finally comes, it simply arrives too late, making for an unsatisfying finale. Nonetheless, I’m happy someone is giving Strickland the money to make films this stylish and weird. I’ll come to his restaurant anytime.

Flux Gourmet played in the Encounters section of the 72nd Berlinale, when this piece was originally written. It is out on monst VoD platforms in September.

Estonian Dispatch: The First Feature Competition Round-Up

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

There are few greater pleasures than watching new visions by debut directors: offering rough and ready versions of ideas that they simply couldn’t wait to get off the page and onto the big screen. The Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival — celebrating its 25th year — offered all of this and more with its First Feature Competition, with 20 films from first-time filmmakers that have little in common besides a desire to make a strong mark upon the cinema stage.

With minimal sleep but plenty of company and even more coffee, I managed to see all 20 films in this debut stage in the small yet bustling city at the heart of Northern Europe. Braving the cold, rain, snow, sleet and slippery streets, and catching a mixture of cinema screenings and screeners — two experienced while waiting in airports — I can safely say that the programme featured a strong combination of crowdpleasers and arthouse experiences, showing off the next generation of filmmakers in style. As Festival Director Tiina Lokk told us in our podcast interview: “There could be mistakes, but you see the talent.“

Other Cannibals

Perhaps the best example of combining both broad appeal with an intense personal vision is the First Feature Competition winner Other Cannibals (Francesco Sossai, pictured above). Beloved by basically every British person I met in the festival, this German-produced, South Tyrol-shot black-and-white tragicomedy is a loopy journey exploring an unusual friendship with shades of the oddball humour of Ben Wheatley. It wouldn’t have been my first choice for the winner — that would’ve been the touching German drama Precious Ivie (Sarah Blaßkiewitz), exploring racism in Germany with great nuance and humanity — but its a deserved winner nonetheless with the potential to be a breakout hit.

The biggest commercial success is probably destined for Immersion (Nicolás Postiglione), a taut Chilean thriller that uses a simple conceit — man stuck on a boat with two strangers and his obstinate daughters — that could easily be remade on Michigan’s Lake Superior. Expect a streaming pick up for this one, which shared the Jury Special Prize with the French Her Way (Cécile Ducrocq), which boasted a brilliant, pick-of-the-fest performance from Call My Agent’s Laure Calamy as a sex worker raising funds for her son’s cooking education.

Often the most interesting visions win the critic’s awards, with the FIPRESCI prize going to Aleksandra Terpińska’s Other People (pictured below),which adapted the unusually-written rap novel by Dorota Maslowska to excellent effect; providing a panoramic portrait of Polish society which doesn’t shy away from its savage critique of unfettered consumerism. A perfect movie to catch just ahead of the Christmas holidays. Using a great array of cinematic tricks, it deserved to be joined by Lithuania’s Feature Film About Life (Dovilė Šarutytė) for its affecting blend of narrative fiction of home-video, but which failed to win any awards.

Other People

I’m broadly happy with the awards, but it is a shame that Asian efforts — from the incredibly well-shot black-and-white, dream-like vision of Chinese film Who Is Sleeping in Silver Grey (Liao Zihao, pictured in header) to the dour, depressing yet truly original Dozens of Norths (Koji Yamamura) from Japan to India’s whimsical The Cloud & The Man (Abhinandan Banerjee)— missed out on any awards. In fact, Immersion was the only non-European film to win an award in this section, making it a more insular, Euro-centric ceremony than it needed to be.

As a British critic, I’m often harshest on my own country’s efforts, which is why it was a shame that The Score (Malachi Smyth) failed to live up to the hype of its ‘heist-musical’ designation. A more un-categorisable entry was Adam Donen’s deeply idiosyncratic Alice, Through the Looking: À la recherche d’un lapin perdu (pictured below), a phantasmagorical journey through space, time, memory, filmmaking, philosophy and almost everything else you can think of. It was a film that didn’t really succeed, but it was deeply interesting nonetheless. Equally entertaining was our conversation with the filmmaker, which you can listen to over on Mixcloud.

Watching movies themselves is only one part of the pleasures involved in a film festival, especially one as egalitarian as Tallinn Film Festival. Where in Berlinale and Cannes access to talent is moderated through PRs, regulated meeting slots, and the dreaded roundtable, Tallinn allows you to easily share drinks, conversations and good times with the talent themselves, especially the debut directors and actors who are just as glad to be there as you. This kind of direct communication allows for the free transfer of ideas and debates about cinema and national character types, giving one the sense of truly being at the centre of the film world, if only for ten days.

Alice, Through the Looking

An excursion to Estonian’s second largest city of Tartu — which will be a European Capital City of Culture in 2024 — was also included as part of the festival’s hospitality package, expanding my understanding of the Baltic nation’s make-up. And whether it was the innovative, digital-first national museum, the melancholic ruins and bridges above the town, the bohemian river-side cafés and bars, or the pink-pastel buildings that suggest Wes Anderson’s next movie, it’s these types of small journeys that definitely expand what a film festival can provide: not just watching one film after another, but the opportunity to engage with a larger cultural context. Estonians don’t just provide cinema, they provide a true sense of unforced community. I simply can’t wait to visit my Baltic friends again this time next year.

Life Suits Me Well (La vie me va bien)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

Fouad (Samir Guesmi) is an irrepressibly cheery father, a dedicated husband and a valued member of his community. It’s the mid-90s and he works fixing the phone lines in a seaside town in Morocco as well as teaching Spanish to older people. Played by veteran French actor Guesmi with broad appeal and warmth, he radiates kindness to almost anyone he meets.

Then one day, when he is teaching a class the verb “to love” he forgets how to say “she loves.” His wife Rita (Lubna Azabal), waiting at the door, finishes it for him. It’s a neat summary of the movie’s main theme, which shows how loving someone changes when they are suffering from an debilitating mental condition. Sometimes we just don’t have the words.

The title of the film, Life Suits Me Well, sums up its own approach to life’s difficulties; finding the humanity despite the inhumanity that such a break in mental illness can bring. At the centre of the story is Ismaïl (Sayyid El Alami), a young teenager who throws up from drinking beer for the first time. Suddenly thrust into adulthood, it is up to him to become more responsible and help provide for the family. The final result is a touching, well-made drama about the bonds of family and staying strong in dreadful circumstances.

Everyone seems to be learning a language in the film. In addition to already knowing French and Arabic, we hear Spanish, English and German being taught. In the background of the drama, we get the sense that Morocco is a place people leave once they reach a certain age, like Ismaïl’s brother living in Paris. This is a personal story from Al Hadi Ulad-Mohand, who has a Moroccan background but lives in Paris. It’s shot with many personal touches — including a hilarious phone line mix up — and lingering shots of the surrounding countryside that feel like a director looking nostalgically back at his past and his own country.

I just wished there were more moments that really heightened the drama instead of simply augmenting it. While the film is less about traditional storytelling than finding those little details that truly bring to life the way a family survives and persists and loves in face of such a tragedy, it does often feel like one thing after another than truly dramatic, especially during the last act.

One moment stands out: Rita sitting on her husband’s lap, kissing him while saying “she misses him.” She might be looking at the same person, but it’s not the same personality anymore. A heartbreaking high point in a modestly impressive debut.

Life Suits Me Well plays in the First Feature section of the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 12-28th November.

Wet Sand

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM LOCARNO

And it all ends in tears. The last film I watched at the joyous Locarno Film Festival is a slow-burn weepie about the price people pay for living in secret. Using a generous two-hour runtime to fully examine the difficulties of living authentically in a small village in Georgia, Wet Sand has a deeply understated yet ultimately rather effective approach to storytelling.

The title refers to a small cafe on the Black Sea, where manly-men tease owner Amnon (Gia Agumava) over his “pisspoor beer.” This is the kind of neighborhood where everyone knows each other to the point where you can’t cough in the distance without somebody commenting upon it. The fault-line that lies behind the generally friendly people is revealed when the local loner Eliko dies by suicide. He is so disliked that nobody wants to bury him, leading to Amnon having to finally step up.

He is joined in his efforts by Moe (Bebe Sesitashvili), who immediately sticks out of place thanks to her ice-white hair. She normally lives in the more liberal Tbilisi, and is struck by how stuck in their ways the people are. The wider context is referred to on TV, reporting on both Family Day celebrations — an Orthodox counteraction to the International Day Against Homophobia — and the effects of climate change, burning forests and polluting the Black Sea. The message is obvious: governments across Europe are cruelly trying to legislate gay lives out of existence — from Russia to Hungary to Georgia — while completely ignoring the fact the Earth is on fire.

No one should have to live in secret, but many do, repressing an essential part of their personality in the process. In depicting this, there is an Ozu-like touch throughout the film, whether it’s the static frames, quiet performances or use of omission, suggesting a wellspring of emotion lingering just beneath the surface. This is a film filled with pregnant pauses, characters taking their time as they think of what to say and how to say it. They simply live in a world where some things are impossible to say out loud, their absence filling the air with a deep, awful sadness.

A timeless feel comes through the camerawork and settings, the film constantly returning us to the relentless waves of the ocean, which gives us all the potential for renewal and rebirth. Director Elene Naveriani is content to simply observe characters as they look at the sea, go for a swim or listen to music; allowing us to see the inner lives of those who must live under such repressive ideas. They also have a masterful command of parallel narratives, creating a tension between the world as it was, as it is, and how it could be in the future. While the film takes a while to come into its own, the intent is exceptionally clear, as is the final powerful message. While it might not light the country on fire like And Then We Danced (Levan Akin, 2019), it’s sure to start some more conversations about the need to treat LGBT people with the dignity they deserve.

Wet Sand plays in Concorso Cineasti del presente at Locarno Film Festival, running from August 4th to 15th.

Our dirty questions to Abel Ferrara

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

Abel Ferrara is back in Locarno, in high spirits and ready to talk about his latest work, Zeros and Ones, shot last year as Rome was under strict lockdown. Just before the interview at the industry lunch (I somehow wrangled an invite for), the three directors of Juju Stories take pictures with him and call him the “King of New York”, a reference to his iconic 1990 film. Cutting a distinctive figure as he walks across the Piazza Grande and shakes hands with programmers and critics, the veteran figure has returned to Lago Maggiore ready to wax lyrical about his latest work — a genre-ish spy thriller that’s heavy on mood and very light on plot. We talked about his productivity during the pandemic, shooting in his local neighbourhood in Rome and wanting to work for as long as he can.

Redmond Bacon – So the film is set during the pandemic. How did it affect your work?

Abel Ferrara – I was fortunate that I was editing a movie. I was able to edit in the beginning when no one knew what was going on. I’m scared like anyone else. I was 69 (70 years old now) and, you know, it’s two different diseases: if you’re 25 it’s a different disease to my age. I spent a lot of my life trying to kill myself. I don’t want to die now. For us, it was just the opposite, because the editors had nothing to do but edit: there’s no going to bars or taking the wife to dinner. At a certain point, I just really wanted to shoot and then this idea that I had before the pandemic started to come into focus and to work.

RB – You have Americans and Russians in a city under occupation. Throw in French and English and you could have The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949)…

AF – Yeah, like the French movies under occupation. Who’s that director of those beautiful movies?

Abel Ferrara

RB – Jean-Pierre Melville?

AF – Yeah. There’s genre aspects of films like Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) too. Ethan’s character himself is one of the lone American solider smoking a cigarette… even the uniform he had is like, they don’t wear that. The uniform that our guys are wearing is a stylised memory.

RB – You seem to prioritise atmosphere a lot more than plot. Is creating a vibe more important than making it clear-cut?

AF – There’s nothing clear cut! That’s the point of the movie. Who’s who and what’s what? What’s everybody’s agenda? Who’s your enemy and who’s your friend? I mean this is real life. You don’t know what side anybody’s on because everybody’s changing. The idea of espionage creates counter espionage, so once you’re in that world of intelligence, it’s by its nature, a lot: you’re accepting that no one is who they are.

Unless you’re a soldier. To be out of uniform, that’s a crime punishable by death. Because if you’ve got a green uniform and I’ve got the other uniform, I know who you are, you know who I am, and we know the rules of engagement. Once you start not wearing a uniform, now comes the great world of what we’re talking about: a world of espionage, William Gibson and Melville.

Zeros and Ones

RB – The Vatican comes off as quite a mysterious and malevolent place, especially with that shot of the saints that ring around St Peter’s Square. Do you feel cynical about Catholic Church and its role in modern society?

AF – I’m not cynical about any place that is preaching spirituality versus consumerism. A: I’m a Buddhist; B, I’m about the word of Jesus Christ. This religion is about a guy who had nothing, who gave everything away, who lived on the street, who didn’t even have shoes. That’s a far cry from what I’m looking at at the back. By the back there’s a political entity. I’m not cynical, I’m just looking at what I’m looking at.

RB – The cinematography is very striking, capturing Rome in the dark. What was it like working with Sean Price Williams, who has worked with the Safdies and Alex Ross Perry, and has such a distinctive style?

AF – He worked with us when he was a kid. I’ve known him since he was young. We live and work in New York together. He was on the crew of Chelsea on the Rocks (2008), we shot The Projectionist (2019) together, we did Sporting Life (2020). He brings the goods.

RB – The film is shot all at night in a deserted city. What was the schedule like?

AF – We didn’t have to wait. We were lucky it was a pandemic. Everything was locked down at 9pm. We used the pandemic as an advantage.

RB – Rome is usually filled with life and vigour, at least in the films I’ve seen. Did you have any references for making it more noirish?

AF – I live in the neighbourhood. I did the documentary Piazza Vittorio (2017). I’ve been living here for seven years, so it’s my hood. Like when I shot in New York, I shot in my neighbourhood.

RB – A lot of films have come out about the coronavirus. And yours is one of the more interesting because it shows just how the world has been thrust into darkness and despair. Would you say it’s been a terrible time for humanity?

Zeros and Ones

AF – All these people dead! I mean, is it terrible? Fuck yeah. Is it true, is it real, do we have to deal with it? Yeah. Is global warming cool? No. The same thing happened one hundred years ago. Nobody’s sitting there nostalgic for 1919. But it is what it is. Your concept of thinking the world is just this place that’s going to be this place that’s going to be here forever and everything going to be the way it is is a fucking fallacy. You’re delusional. Anything can happen at any minute and you’ve got to deal with it. It’s life on life’s term bro. So, is it going to throw you into a deep dark depression? I’m not going to let it. Unless I get it, then I’m either gonna die or get over it.

RB – Does it make you want to create more as an artist?

AF – We’re working. It’s neither here nor there. We’re doing our thing. At this point of my life I still believe in movies. I want to make movies. And I still have the ability to: I can walk, I can talk. I don’t know about thinking straight, but just as long as I can point. At this point of my life I still believe in movies.

RB – What about for streamers such as Netflix?

AF – We’re final cut directors so as long as we have control of the financing, of the budget, of the final cut, we’re not sweating where the money’s coming from.

RB – What are you working on next?

AF – A film about Padre Pio, with Shia LaBeouf. I’m dealing with the period of 1920. There was a massacre in San Giovanni Rotondo. He got the stigmata at the same time, so it was just an incredible moment.

Zeros and Ones premiered at Locarno Festival on Thursday 12th August as part of the Concorso Internazionale.

Picture at the top by Redmond Bacon.

Mostro

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM LOCARNO

Mostro is a couple of different ideas mashed together — an experimental light show and a slice-of-life drama. The light show is interesting to a certain formal extent while the realism eventually strains the viewer’s patience. Even at a fleet seventy-seven minutes, this Mexican portrait of wayward and forgotten youths, albeit ambitious at its most visually expressive, didn’t do much for me at all.

Lucas (Salvador de la Garza) has lost his girlfriend. They were hanging out in a little shack, taking drugs, then the police arrived and she was apparently taken. He works in a factory and balances the difficulty of doing his day job with trying to figure out where she has actually gone. Her disappearance is the animating absence behind the film, an arthouse conceit that brings to mind L’Aventurra (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960) and the work of Abbas Kiarostami.

Mostro takes a kitchen-sink stylistic approach, combining low-light nighttime shaky-cam scenes with impressive tracking shots and expressive portraits of memories, lights and colour melding together to create a vivid conception of memory, identity and relationships. But as the film moves from a contemplative and picturesque mode into a character study, we rarely understand what make Lucas tick besides his humdrum work lifting things on a factory floor.

Lucas doesn’t fundamentally change throughout the movie. He is the same depressed and unresponsive person whether he is in the throes of love with his girl or whether he is frantically searching for her. This lack of development makes it hard to sympathise with his plight. While de la Garza provides fine work, especially in the more frantic scenes, it would’ve helped to get more under his skin other than through vague voiceover and cryptic flashbacks. More interesting is his confrontation with the police, who seem particularly blasé about where his girlfriend has gone or the manner of her disappearance. If the film dug deeper into the indifference of bureaucracy, it could’ve been a piercing critique, but this is quickly passed over in favour of more deeply held close ups and thinly light portraits.

Nonetheless, the wider context of teenage disappearance — a national issue in Mexico — doesn’t seem to interest first-time director José Pablo Escamilla that much, who has a keen eye for striking mise-en-scène, but few ideas to keep the thematic clock ticking. The aforementioned experimental moments seem to vanish by the later half of the film, creating a secondary stylistic absence that make one wonder why they existed in the first place – either the two styles blend by the end, or they create a strange dichotomy; here they seem to barely relate to each other.

Lucas must return to his job, suffering the inequities of oppressive managers while worried sick, creating a vivid critique about how capitalism at its most acute cannot let people rest. Sadly, whether shot in the dark or caught on headache-inducing shaky-cam, Lucas’ strife becomes difficult to genuinely care about. With little closure and a whispy finale, Mostro’s formally ambitious conceits amount to a lot of style about nothing much at all.

Mostro plays in the Concorso Cineasti del presente at Locarno Film Festival, running from August 4-15th .

Luzifer

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM LOCARNO

The devil is very much alive in Luzifer — even if we don’t see him, his malignant presence lingers across every frame of this haunted, dour Austrian film. Telling the story of two religious fanatics who live in an Alpine hut threatened by the tourism industry, it creates a modern-day parable about the price of isolation and the dangers posed by capitalism.

Director Peter Brunner is interested in extreme states of mind, as previously expressed in his Caleb Landry Jones-starring To The Night (2018), telling the story of a man obsessed with fire. Flames are replaced here by extreme religious penance, Johannes (Franz Rogowski) constantly forced to self-flagellate by his overbearing and overly-intimate mother Maria (Susanne Jensen). They live a simple existence, living off a generator and supplies provided by another local Alpine dweller. But their religious and sacred world is interrupted by the presence of whirring drones, a harbinger of a future that has no place for them.

Franz Rogowski is one of the most interesting actors in contemporary German-language cinema, taking the kind of versatile roles that explore the different facets of wounded masculinity. His Johannes might be the most stripped down performance yet — both literally in his shaven head and often naked appearance — and in the vulnerability he lays bare as a mentally underdeveloped adult. (It’s a shame he doesn’t speak much, because it would’ve been interested to see him attempt an Austrian accent.) Susanne Jensen is equally intense, constantly invoking images of the devil and themes of poisoned minds that betray a deep wound at her centre. Their life cannot truly exist in modern Austria, even though they live so remotely, as they are being hounded to leave so a ski lift can be put in their place.

A sense of evil is well-portrayed through the production design, featuring odd, tortured wood carvings of religious images, and the swooping camera-work, showing off the wintry Austrian alps. One match cut in particular, cutting from Maria’s ear to a hole in the centre of a mountain, is particularly inspired, creating a void that lingers at the centre of the movie. The devil seems to be everywhere, but he is also nowhere. This is the essential problem with the movie; there’s nothing to actually be scared of.

Are the developers the devil? Or is the devil in Johannes, who despite his limited speech patterns and simple manner, occasionally runs off with a younger lady to satisfy his sexual needs? It’s hard to parse as Luzifer constantly adds layer after layer of sick, twisted moments that feel of a piece with the Austria’s austere and harsh arthouse film productions. The evidently talented Brunner could easily make a proper exorcism drama that would terrify viewers, but Luzifer ultimately doesn’t stick. Of course it’s filled with horrific images — incest, insects, the possessed — but they aren’t wrapped in the kind of production that makes one feel genuinely revolted. There’s no being worse in Christian belief than the literal devil, but here he’s the kind of guy who can easily be replaced by a ski lift.

Luzifer plays in Concorso internazionale at Locarno Film Festival, running from August 4th to 15th.