LOCARNO 2009: To Live and Die in Switzerland

As I trudge around from one European festival to another (pity me, dear reader), I boringly repeat the litany that there are too many festivals and too few good films. Yet, in the lovely lakeside Swiss town of Locarno, I was hoping to eat my words. (It's too expensive to eat much else!).

The center of the Locarno Film Festival (and of the town) is the splendid Piazza Grande, where crowds gather every night to watch "popular" films on the giant screen. These need not detain us long with the exception of the closing film, The Two Horses of Genghis Khan (Chingisiyn Hoyor Zagal), which is not a very low-budget epic as the title suggests, but a semi-documentary by Byambasuren Davaa, the Mongolian director of The Story of the Weeping Camel and The Cave of the Yellow Dog. With few concessions to western tastes, it follows the singer Uma Chahar Tugchi’s quest to find a horse-shaped violin neck on which are inscribed some lost lyrics of a famous song that recounts the tumultuous history of the Mongolians. The unusual journey through the wild landscapes of Outer and Inner Mongolia is amusing, illuminating, stimulating and moving.

Also shown on the giant screen was To Live and Die in L.A.—part of a tribute to director William Friedkin, who received the Leopard of Honour. The film was as action-packed and as crass as I remembered it, but Friedkin, unlike his films, turned out to be witty and intelligent at the master class he gave, mainly concentrating on his best film, The French Connection (a long time ago!). One amusing anecdote revealed that he wanted neither Gene Hackman ("a very boring man") nor Fernando Rey, who was cast by mistake instead of Francisco Rabal.

One of the great strengths of the Locarno festival has always been its retrospectives. I clearly remember a comprehensive Orson Welles series a few years ago. Unfortunately, this year, from a personal point of view, I was particularly disappointed that the retrospective was Manga Impact—The World of Japanese Animation, showing no fewer than 28 feature films, and dozens of shorts and TV series. Everywhere one turned, there were child characters from various manga staring at us with their large Occidental eyes. No matter how technically miraculous most of them are, I'm afraid their content is mainly aimed at 12-year-olds and younger, or perhaps immature adults. I also fear for the future of the culture and literacy of the computer-obsessed generation. One of the better titles, as I was told by a Mangamaniac, was Summer Wars, in the International Competition, about a teenage girl who destroys a monster created by a young computer hacker... (pardon me while I stifle a yawn).

The competition, mainly world premieres, was the usual mixture (for any "A" category festival) of the good, the bad and the ugly. Out of the 18 films, there were around ten of some interest. (I will allow the bad ones to rest in peace.) I particularly liked The Portuguese Nun (A Religiosa Portuguesa), by Eugène Green, an American who says he has "lived in Paris forever." A many-layered fable set in a ravishly shot Lisbon with passionate Fado songs, it is, in a way, like a Manoel Oliveira film made by someone else, but it goes beyond pastiche and/or homage to the Portuguese centenarian.

Diego Martinez Vignatti's The Tango Singer (La Cantante de Tango), with its accomplished play on time and space, evoked Alain Resnais (one of the signs of an auteur is that one references them). It had an uncluttered plot: the singer of the title tries to cope with the breakup of her marriage, mainly through landscape and song. With a number of films in which characters are seen (uncinematically) using a computer and texting, it was a relief that the heavily atmospheric and enigmatic Buben.Baraban, directed by Alexei Mizgirev, was set in an old-fashioned library in some awful provincial Russian town, which seems no different from Soviet times. Books play an essential part of the plot, and the librarian (the remarkable Natalya Negoda of 1988's Little Eva) is full of unbridled passion.

However, the standout film of the competition was an Irish-Netherlands co-production called Nothing Personal (a two-pronged title), the first feature from the Polish-born Urszula Antoniak. Almost a two-hander, it focuses on a developing relationship between a widower (Stephen Rea) living in isolation on the west coast of Ireland (breathtakingly shot by Daniel Bouquet), and a bitter young divorcee (Lotte Verbeek), both attempting to return to a meaningful existence.

Although the word "film" is becoming a misnomer—because the majority of movies seen at festivals these days are shot on digital or are computer-generated—directors of real talent can use any technology at their disposal and triumph. My most vivid memory of this year's fest was La Paura (Fear), which was shot entirely on a cell phone by Pippo Delbono, better known as a stage actor. The tiny cameraphone, wielded like a sharpened knife, dissects the racism and hypocrisy of Italy through a range of quasi-related incidents. Delbono transformed the pocket accessory into an instrument of freedom.

Post-Awards Update (or Post Mortem): You'd think a jury composed of Pascal Bonitzer (the French screenwriter who has written for Rivette and Ruiz); Hong Sang-soo, the Korean auteur; Jonathan Nossiter, who made Mondovino; adventurous Spanish producer Luis Minarro, and actresses Nina Hoss and Alba Rohrwacher would have known better than to give the grand prize, The Golden Leopard, to She, A Chinese—a pointless, episodic, exploitative United Kingdom-Germany-France coproduction about exploitation; it was one of the worst films in the competition. The fact that it was directed (clumsily) by Xiaolu Guo, a Chinese novelist living in London, doesn't make it any less unconvincing. The jury also had the ignorance or indolence to give both the Best Director and Special Jury Prizes to the same film, Buben.Baraban, when they should have known that the Special Jury prize, at most festivals, allows the jury to choose alternative films that missed out on a prize. What most international juries need is an experienced critic who could steer them in the right direction.

Posted by ahillis at August 17, 2009 6:00 AM