Tag: sarajevo film festival

Pacifiction

Posted on by John Bleasdale

Albert Serra has steadily gained a reputation as a filmmaker to watch. Provocatively, he has mixed the high and the low, no more explicitly as in his Cannes shocker Liberté (2019); and yet there was frequently the suspicion that there was more ambition than effect. Like someone poking you sharply in the ribs to gain your attention only to forget what he had to tell you.

Pacifiction might well be his first out and out masterpiece. Visually stunning via the cinematography of Artur Tort, there is barely a shot or moment in the film that is not worthy of absorbed contemplation. Benoît Magimel plays De Roller, the high commissioner for France of Tahiti in French Polynesia. As he likes to remind people, he is the representative of the State. He shamelessly employs his power to garner his business interests and give himself access to the local nightclubs. In his double-breasted white suit and perpetual sunglasses, he could have slipped from between the mound mottled pages of a Graham Greene novel. He negotiates with the locals, both officially and via the underworld. Various pies have been fingered. A new casino is due to open. The navy admiral (Marc Susini) is orbiting like a little mosquito. A mysterious Portuguese man has lost his passport. The CIA have a presence. And De Roller begins a flirtatious friendship with a transgender hotel worker (Pahoa Mahagafanau).

But the overarching concern is that there are rumors that France is too resume nuclear testing. De Roller’s attitude is slippery, at one point pointing out that nuclear testing caused cancer, but then implying that somehow it also created the possibility of treating that cancer. It is a charmingly obtuse rationalisation which demonstrates the man’s demonic talent for remaining aloof of human empathy while appearing to be intellectually engaged in the world he floats through.

Despite all the plotting, the actual plot is scant and the audience are kept at a distance. De Roller is as enigmatic and slippery for us as he is for the islanders: Magimel imbues him with a wonderful charm. He rarely has a bad word for anyone: engaging in a constant stream of glad-handing conversation. He has his appetites for the life of Tahiti, the food, the colors, the nightlife, the natural environment – but he is a voyeuristic appreciator as languidly excited by the violence of a ritual dance as he is by the jaw-dropping scene in which he boats out to witness first hand the giant waves crashing in.

Doom – as resonant as in any JG Ballard novel – looms over the island and Magimel reveals himself as someone who might well enjoy the apocalypse on aesthetic grounds. In this he no doubt mirrors Serra’s own fascination. There is a definite erotic fizz to the shadiness and corruption smells so invitingly sweet. White underpanted waiters serve drinks to sailors; natural splendor and beautiful sunsets and seascapes abound. This is a film which portrays a tropical evil which never loses sight of the former beauty of the fallen angel in his white suit and tinted glasses.

Pacifiction premiered at The Sarajevo Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It also showed in October in the UK at the BFI London Film Festival. In cinemas on Friday, April 21st. On VoD on June 27th.

Men of Deeds (Oameni de Treaba)

Posted on by John Bleasdale

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM SARAJEVO

Being the only policeman in a small village in Northern Romania shouldn’t be that hard. There might be the odd six families that do all the stealing, but for the most part all you really have to do is run errands for the mayor and not get into trouble. So Ilie – played by popular Romanian comedian Iulian Postelnicu – tells a new recruit (Anghel Damian) fresh from the academy. Ilie really doesn’t care about the job. What he really wants is an orchard. But the question is how much is he willing to compromise in order to get it?

Paul Neghoescu’s feature is a blackly comic satire on politics as it’s played out at the local and potentially most corrupt level. There is an obvious beauty to the countryside, though the village has recently been hit by floods, and one can understand Ilie’s longing for a little piece of land and something to look on with joy. The locals are a mix of free roaming chickens, mouth-breathing thugs and headscarved hardworking women and the powerful leaders of the community comprised of the avuncular major Constantin (Vasile Muraru) and his brother (Daniel Busuioc) a lumbering potentially psychopathic priest.

And Ilie himself is an ‘anything for a quiet life’ type. A brutal murder disrupts the delicate balance, but even so Ilie does his best to keep the peace with the added incentive of an orchard the mayor might be willing to give him cheap. The academy fresh rookie has other ideas though and risks upsetting the balance. As the violence begins to escalate, including the intimidation of the victim’s widow (Cristina Semciuc) who Ilie has an unrequited crush on, the hapless policeman must work out which side he truly wants to stand on.

Postelnicu is superb and the film at times seems to exist more as a vehicle for his obvious talents rather than an independent entity in and of itself. His policeman is a slacker who seems to have found something like the quiet life. He goes along to get along and has very little that’s admirable about him, but quite a lot which is likable. His thin frame and the deadpan face which always seems stuck between incomprehension and a grimace gives him a Keatonesque melancholy. As the film progresses however the tone shifts notably into something much darker and the last act slides into bloody farce. Whether the film has anything deeper to say about corruption and how winking at small misdeeds leads to ever deeper swamps of corruption is open to question. But there are comedies where even the cries of pain can become very funny – and no less real for that.

Men of Deed premiered at the 25th Sarajevo Film Festival, whichs is being held from August 12th to the 19th.

Fire of Love

Posted on by John Bleasdale

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM SARAJEVO

I have always loved volcanos. Ever since I was a child visiting the Natural History Museum in Edinburgh on a school trip and I bought a book about them. Who wouldn’t? The moment all that is solid flows like water, heat of the surfaces matches the core of the earth and explosions many multiples of nuclear bombs destroy entire mountains. Did you know Mount Etna grows by a metre every year? The non-volcanic Mount Everest manages a measly three centimetres. Then again the whole of Etna could be slung into the air at any moment and the cartographers would have to revise the altitude radically down. Rutger Hauer voice: That’s what it is to be a volcano.

So I fully understand Katia and Maurice Krafft’s obsessional devotion to these temperamental mountains. The pair group up not too far from each other in the Alsace region of France where they independently became fascinated in vulcanology. Having met, they started organising trips to eruptions and documenting their own adventures with films that became popular spectacles but also scientifically important in the understanding of the underlying geological – geothermal activity. Their work also had a more consequential impact in informing at risk communities of the need to evacuate: something which tragically did not happen when Nevado del Ruiz erupted in Columbia and thousands died in the ensuing mudslides.

Sara Dosa’s documentary lovingly delvers into the cinematic heroes who shot incredible amounts of footage at great personal risk – sometimes foolhardy in their adventurousness. Indeed, with their matching red bobble hats and perverse sense of adventure, the couple appear to have escaped a Wes Anderson movie. There are differences of approach. Maurice wants to canoe down a lava river to the sea in Hawaii and Katia thinks he’s an idiot.

The film benefits enormously from the knowing eccentricities of the couple – Maurice in particular is a polished media savvy presence, even as he pretends to a no-nonsense workman like persona – as well as the spectacular footage which is the film’s core appeal. It’s less successful in its narration which Miranda July provides with a sort of sleepy wistfulness. It grasps for a Werner Herzog-kind of poetry, but suffers by not being Werner Herzog.

There is a contemporary resonance in the tale of scientists struggling to avert disasters in the face of unknowing populations and obstinate and reluctant governments. Ultimately, though the film is about the fascination of lava flung into the air, clouds of billowing dust that reaches miles into the atmosphere and the mythically huge drama of the Earth living. The puny humans in the foreground are at once dwarfed by the immense drama unfolding and elevated by their own obsessed love.

Fire of Love premiered at the 28th Sarajevo Film Festival runs from August 12th to the 19th.