Tag: Venice

The Red Suitcase

Posted on by Paul Risker

Sparse on narrative, Fidel Devkota’s directorial feature debut, The Red Suitcase, follows the two-day journey of a delivery pick-up driver. He’s transporting boxes from Kathmandu airport to a remote village in the mountains. Meanwhile, a man is seen on route to the same village with a small red suitcase.

While on the surface it resembles calm waters, beneath the tranquility are perilous swells. Devkota, whose background is in anthropology, brings a unique eye to the film form, and crafts what is likely to be an acquired taste. It echoes the tradition of arthouse cinema, and yet conveys the individual spiritual culture and traditions of Nepal, that, to the Western eye, gives it a feeling of otherness.

For huge swathes, the film omits any dialogue, engaging the audience through silence. At 85 minutes, it’s a slow-burn movie that merges horror with the political and philosophical. It’s at the 20-minute mark, when he’s parked on the road, that one of the first signs of the horror occurs. It’s something the driver cannot explain, but to the audience it’s an escalation of a strange moment at a petrol station, which reveals an unsettling horror.

Meanwhile, in a later scene, a conversation opens up the film’s political inclinations, that merges with the philosophical, or rather, Nepalese existential crisis. This, however, leans more into political and cultural anxiety, but the seething criticism of the government is laid bare.

Devkota patiently reveals his intentions, and yet The Red Suitcase manages to internalise some of its thoughts, never offering us the impression that the film or its filmmaker have fully bared their souls.

A film that will divide audiences, it needs to be viewed through a specific lens. The anthropological gaze of its director, who places an emphasis on what he describes as, “meticulous ethnographical details that can deepen emotions and drive the narrative forward”, will challenge some Western audiences. The cinematography is traditional, and the long takes recall western arthouse, but beneath the film form’s universal language, the ethnographical details imbue The Red Suitcase with a complexity. We must see and hear, not only look and listen, in order to fully understand the nuanced communication within the imagery.

Despite the one conversation, The Red Suitcase treats death and grief as something that words cannot begin to address. Throughout, one senses the hopelessness of the Nepalese reality, an ongoing cycle where grief and despair spread. Sometimes the response is silent, sometimes it’s spoken, and other times it feels as though people are paralysed by it. To his credit, it’s a way into the film before the director hints at what’s inside the boxes, and by the end, the most apt description for this beguiling work is that it has something to do with death.

Devkota announces himself onto the world cinema stage with a meditative reflection on Nepal – specifically the price a country pays when the young are treated as expendable. His accomplishment is to speak to a diverse global audience, while also speaking about events and cultural traditions that the domestic audience will recognise.

The Red Suitcase has just had screened in the Orizzonti section of the 2023 Venice Film Festival.

Dormitory (Yurt)

Posted on by Paul Risker

QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM VENICE

Director Nehir Tuna’s feature debut, Dormitory, opens in 1996, when tensions between religious and secular Turks were mounting. In the midst of the religious and political friction, fourteen-year-old Ahmet (Doğa Karakaş) has been sent by his father to a Yurt, to learn traditional Muslim values. Unbeknownst to his father (Tansu Biçer), Ahmet sneaks out to attend a secular school, a secret he guards from almost everyone. He even lies to the school bus driver, who drops him off outside a house where he pretends to live. From there, he discreetly returns to his dormitory at the Yurt, negotiating his place between two worlds.

Going into Dormitory, I wasn’t expecting to be skipping, singing and dancing afterwards, like I would if I’d watched Singin’ in the Rain (Gene Kelly/ Stanley Donen, 1952). Nor did I want to. Dormitory’s appeal was that it would plough through the depths of oppressive anxiety, and explore how youth is a precarious, and potentially traumatising period in a person’s life. It’s a film that adequately meets these expectations, and without cynicism surrenders itself to the realisation that life is to be survived, and sometimes we have to either accept, or if we’re lucky, choose the hell we’re living.

This is an idea expressed by Ahmet’s only friend in the Yurt, Hakan (Can Bartu Arslan), who accepts that this might be the best place for him. With street smarts the wealthier Ahmet lacks, there’s a class interplay between the pair, that Tuna suggests more than he acts upon. Throughout the story, it’s a silent antagonist, stalking, waiting until it’s time to strike.

While I’ve offered a dark and oppressive appraisal thus far, Tuna’s film is not without joyous, rebellious and humorous moment, but the objective of this type of story is to oppress the audience with heavier emotions and themes. Despite moments of relief, Dormitory honours the anxiety and pain of one teenager’s yearning. It opens with a catchy albeit intrusive score, that, alongside the text that establishes the political and religious context, sounds an ominous warning of the dramatic storm that’s to come.

Tuna draws on personal experience, who, as a child, spent five years in what he describes as a “religious dormitory”, and this is likely why, throughout the story, we keenly feel the pressure Ahmet experiences. There’s a notable duality that contributes to his internalised and externalised pressure. While he wants to escape the Yurt, he tries to belong, maybe in part to placate his parents, and partly driven by the instinct to find communal belonging, even if it means compromising his identity and values.

Meanwhile, in the secular school, a potential romantic interest, Sevinç (Işıltı Su Alyanak), asserts how unsettling it is to think there’s a student amongst them who lives in a Yurt. The harsh nature of these words is added to by the affection the pair share – swapping presents, walking and talking in the school yard. Dormitory touches upon the idea of conformity, but also the complications in a fractured and adversarial society, where prejudicial hostility is rife.

Ahmet is the archetypal outsider, caught between two worlds – we must consider the question whether he can truly belong to either side, or must he walk his own path? The monochrome cinematography accentuates his experience of being caught in the shadows of religious and secular Turkey. It’s not merely an aesthetic choice, but one that connects with the substance of the story, which appears to be about Ahmet, but is it? The story may be as much about his father, who represents the insecurities and regrets of one generation that shapes the experiences of another generation. As his father says to him, “You are my redemption, my salvation.”

Dormitory is an incisive reflection on generational relationships, and despite being rich in themes and ideas, maybe Tuna missed an opportunity to explore these more thoroughly. However, I’d suggest Dormitory should be appreciated in an experiential context. The director, who is drawing off personal experiences, invites us into Ahmet’s space, to witness and experience the tumultuous society of mid-90s Turkey.

Instead of building a rigorous conversation around themes and ideas, it’s an experiential film. It lets us bear witness to an intimate yearning and anguish, but its strength is to avoid making any critical statements or answering any questions. Instead, Tuna prefers to leave his audience to resolve their feelings about the experience they’ve been privy to.

Dormitory has just had its World Premiere in the Orizzonti section of the 2023 Venice Film Festival.

Venice’s “bumper year” draws to an impressive end

Posted on by victorfraga

Let me help you picture the scene. I get to Venice by train, crossing the bridge of freedom until I get to the Santa Lucia railway station, the patron saint of eyesight. A good start considering the strain my eyes are going to be over the next few days. Then a vaporetto – a waterbus – which churns down the Grand Canal and out to the Lido, a spit of land a few miles long and a mile or so wide. Here we have the Palazzo del Cinema, the Casino and the Palabiennale: a movie village. Yes, the red carpet is walled off to prevent the crowds from gathering, but they come anyway to spy Timothee Chalamet and Zendaya through the gaps in the chain link fence. The sun is warm this year, somehow skipping the end of days storm that traditionally wrecks the place about halfway through the Festival. Spritz is poured by the gallon and despite the masks and social distancing we all eat crisps from a shared plate that comes with the aperitif. Such are the contradictions.

But enough of the local Aperol colour, what about the films? It seems I’ve been saying this has been a bumper year for the past four or five years. Last year was an amazing year just in the fact that it happened at all. But yes, this has been a bumper year. It was front loaded like a Citroen with the engine at the back. Pedro Almodovar opened proceedings with Parallel Mothers, a graceful and mature work featuring a stupendous Penelope Cruz who would win the Coppe Volpe for best actor. She could just have easily won it for Official Competition, a brilliant witty piece of metafiction in which she plays a radical director whose demanding process might itself have been inspired by her work with Pedro.

No sooner had we caught our breath, than we were faced with Paolo Sorrentino and Jane Campion. I’ve never been a huge Sorrentino fan. Or scratch that. I liked him, was dazzled by him and then I began to get a headache and began to wonder if all that loudness was actually conveying anything. Hand of God is a very personal film, a coming of age story that encompasses the deaths of his parents and his own dawning ambition to be a film director. But right from the start he likes tits that jiggle and thinks there’s nothing funnier than a fat person. The caricatures are meant to be crude and the pubescent sexuality likewise. The crowd liked it and it is certainly a step up from the bad fart that was Loro.

The Power of the Dog was a personal project of another sort. Jane Campion had been trying to bring Thomas Savage’s book to the screen for some time. It stars Benedict Cumberbatch as a sadistic cowboy called Phil, who entertains a savage dislike for his brother’s new wife, Jesse Pelmons and Kirsten Dunst playing the newly wed couple. It is a strikingly handsome film, scored by Jonny Greenwood and making impressive use of its New Zealand locations. And yet I couldn’t quite go with it all the way. The film ought to have the power of There Will Be Blood, but I never quite believed in Phil, which might be part of the point of the film. It’s one I need to think about, and you never have time to think at these things.

The next day it was Spencer (Pablo Larrain) and of course Dune, perhaps the most eagerly anticipated film of the Festival. Let’s start with Spencer which needed to shake off the feeling that it was a bottle episode of The Crown. Personally, I think it managed, but lord, is it patchy. Kristen Stewart’s Lady Diana is by turns brilliant and in another moment a shaky impersonation. As with Power of the Dog, perhaps that’s the point director Larrain is making. And so to Arrakis and making sure that the Spice must flow. Does it? Yep. For me it does. Of course, we have to suspend disbelief that the studio fully intends to make the concluding half of the film for any of this to be meaningful. But I thoroughly enjoyed being immersed in a world I was first introduced to some 30 odd years ago lying in the grass reading my hardback copy of Frank Herbert’s novel borrowed from Barrow-in-Furness public library.

Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho was a messy but entertaining mash up of a musical and a horror film. Why doesn’t Edgar Wright just go ahead and make a musical? The film stands or falls on your ability to believe that a fashion student could afford a roomy bedsit in central London or not. Bar job or no. Said fashion student (Thomasin McKenzie) gets whizzed off to the 1960s every night to live a double life as Ana-Taylor Joy, but nostalgia has a corrosive effect and things turn dark as the tone shifts between pop fun and J-horror.

But some of my favourite films were those I hadn’t really been expecting much from. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s feature debut The Lost Daughter is an adaptation (written by Gyllenhaal herself for which she won the best screenplay award) of Elena Ferrante’s novel. It stars Olivia Colman as an academic on a working holiday in Greece whose encounter with a young family leads her to think about her own youth and her own motherhood. This is a blindingly honest piece of work, full of nuance and beauty. I wonder if it was directed by a complete unknown, we’d all be hailing this as one of the most exciting debuts in recent years.

There was a definite feeling of falling off, post-weekend. The films sneak off to Toronto and the North American journalists follow shortly thereafter. Festival lanyards begin to smell like wet mice and lack of sleep means that I could see the aura around the security guards. I certainly saw one around Jury President Bong Joon-ho when we interrupted his meal to get a photograph. “Parasite”, he muttered under his breath. And Luca Guadagnino showed up on a bike outside the bakery where I get my morning pastry.

But there were still films to come and some of them were truly magnificent. Sundown continues Michel Franco’s misanthropic odyssey to become the Mexican Michael Haneke. It stars Tim Roth as a rich tourist who in the midst of family tragedy hides away in a cheap hotel. If you don’t like people, you’ll love it. And even if you do like people, it’ll make you think. Another film that echoed through my head was The Hole, the new sui generis by Michelangelo Frammartino, director of The Four Times (2010). It’s a poetic film which recreates the 1963 exploration of one of the deepest caves in the world with the death of an old herdsman. There’s no conventional dialogue, no story as such, and yet an epic tale unfolds of voices that echo in the mountains and under the mountains also.

I headed home on the last day happy to have caught The Last Duel, Sir Ridley Scott’s latest period drama, historical epic, which comes complete with Matt Damon mullet and Scott’s trademark sideways snow. It’s also his best film since Thelma and Louise and something of a companion piece too. Returned to the bosom of my family and cutting the grass, as you should immediately on returning from a film festival to bring you back to who you really are, the last thing to do was watch the awards ceremony on YouTube and see if Spike Lee might make an appearance, just for shits and giggles. Alas no, but Happening (L’Évènement; pictured above) took the top prize, completing a bumper 12 months for women filmmakers who’ve collectively won the Oscar, the Palme d’Or and now the Golden Lion. The film is a timely – Jesus Christ how timely – reminder of the horrors of being a sexually active young woman when abortion is illegal. Collecting the award, director Audrey Diwan called her lead actor Annamaria Vartolomei on stage to join her in the celebrations. It was a perfect ending to a great festival. I hope you’ve enjoyed the coverage. Who knows? Next year perhaps you’ll come along too.