Romanian director Bogdan George Apetri and actress Ana Ularu (Periferic) at Festival del Film Locarno

Image: M. Demir

Review: Periferic (Romania, 2010) - Concorso Internazionale

Image courtesy of Festivale del Film Locarno

It took me 6 days to find an astonishing movie here at the Festival del Film Locarno.

Periferic (Outbound), by Romanian director Bogdan George Apetri, shows us the 24 hours of leave Matilda gets from the women prison to attend her mother’s funeral. The film starts at dawn and ends at dawn. These 24 hours are dramatically condensed in a terrific story supported by magnificent performances of literally every actor. One performance stands out though. The one of Ana Ularu, portraying Matilda.

From the opening scenes we see a troubled young woman hardened by prison life who’s planning to escape the country (Romania) while being on leave. The first person she meets is no family. No friend either, but a truckdriver. The husband of one of the other inmates who has agreed (for a considerable fee) to smuggle Matilda out of the country. Matilda rarely speaks; nonetheless her body language and facial expression are so poignant that words are useless. The film is cleverly constructed on visits during this day to three of the most important men in her life.

The first is Andrei, her older brother, another brilliant performance by Andi Vasluianu. Matilda’s past is so compromised that when she visits him straight out of prison he doesn’t know how to react. His wife is very clear and flat out rejects the whole idea of her criminal sister-in-law attending the funeral, and has no problems in sharing this with Matilda in harsh words. The following scenes, including the burial of their mother, show a complicated relationship between brother and sister. Andrei loves his sister but is not man enough to stand up against his dominant wife and let’s her down in a heartbreaking scene. Just one of many to follow. The second man she pays a visit is her former lover Paul, portrayed by Mimi Branescu. A cynical, ruthless playboy-criminal who she took the rap for, ending in prison. He is the father of Matilda’s son Toma, who Paul coldly dumped in an orphanage after the incarceration of Matilda. Toma is the third man. Before going to prison she made a deal with Paul, involving money. Money she desperately needs to get out. The movie deals with a young woman’s struggle for freedom, reclaiming her son and trying to come to terms with her family who’s ashamed of her past. Apetri shows us a strong woman giving everything she has to achieve her goals in just 24 hours in a race against time. It’s set during a summer day, and I felt myself hoping to keep seeing daylight. Daylight meant she had time. Time to succeed, to ultimately change life for herself and her son, Toma, portrayed by the beautiful young actor Timotei Duma.

The film is gritty and well shot. The camera is always following Matilda getting up-close , registering every nuance in her face. The film is action packed and an emotional rollercoaster which compel the audience to root for the anti-hero Matilda. An anti-hero because Apetri clearly shows that Matilda isn’t only a victim, but also someone who made bad decisions in her past.

Bogdan George Apetri is New-York based, he graduated in film directing and cinematography at Columbia University. No stranger to American Cinema, as this movie proves. Apetri, just like Aronofsky, manages to make his protagonist so human, so real, you must care as an audience. You have no choice than to get involved with the protagonist who is his or her own worst enemy, just like Randy the Ram in The Wrestler Apetri and Aronofsky seem to be the new exponents of New Hollywood Cinema . The torch, lit by Scorsese, Coppola, Friedkin and Schrader is being passed on to young directors like Apetri., who rely on strong performances, a no-nonse approach and passion for story. Periferic (which means peripheral) is a film about it’s very title. Not only in it’s surroundings but even more about all the characters, living and operating on the edges of society, each struggling for a better life going against all the odds. Lot’s of movies are made concerning this theme in Europe nowadays. It’s very much in vogue. Most tend to be melodramatic, or the other extreme, too cerebral and politic in it’s approach. They are more or less studies on modern day Europe in decay. Forgetting about character and story. Cinematic essays, not cinematic experiences. Apetri focuses on character and story exposing through the pain of his lead and the clarity and thrusting force of the narrative more than any film or documentary I’ve seen on the Festival de film Locarno.

A work of art has the power to attack the nervous system of a human being, provoking an immediate emotional response, not an intellectual one. Seeing this film amidst all other films at this festival was like walking through a museum you’ve never visited before packed with Social Realism paintings to ultimately discover a Francis Bacon, sending shivers to your spinal chord. And that’s what it ‘s all about.

Keep an eye on Bogdan George Apetri. I know I will!

Rating: ****

Review: L'Avocat (France, 2010) - World Premiere

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Before the screening of L’Avocat French director Cédric Anger made it very clear that his inspiration came from the classic American organized crime thrillers. L’Avocat is about the young penal lawyer Leo, portrayed by Benoît Magimel (La Pianiste, Le Roi danse), rising fast in the world of criminal law by signing a deal with the devil, the mob boss Paul Vanoni and the price he eventually pays for that. The director’s fascination of these American films is seen in the very first shot of the movie.

The young penal lawyer Leo lies on a stretcher. He has just been shot and is being raced to the hospital. Not only the same beginning as Carlito’s Way, but also the exact same shot. A close-up from above, adding even voice-over of Leo contemplating where it all went wrong. After this first shot the story goes into flashback. Identical to the masterpiece by De Palma! This was only the first of, not references, but blatant copies of scenes or settings straight out of the much admired American mob movies that we have all seen numerous times.

After this opening, the story of the young lawyer going to the top is edited in the conventional American-style. Wipe-overs to cut to the next scene, and split screens like ones De Palma got famous for. Leo’s voice-over is used reminiscent the way Scorsese uses this narrative in Casino. In Scorsese’s film it is used explaining the audience how the mob controlled Vegas and skimmed the top of the profits the casino has made. In L’Avocat the voice-over is used in a similar way, explaining how the boss he has to defend operates in waste management (where have we seen that before?).

Yes, exactly, in The Sopranos. Director Anger even goes so far, as to steal an entire scene from the television series. Vanoni’s soldiers hijack a truck with the cooperation of the truck driver himself, who asks to be hit by one of them so he won’t be suspected from collaborating. Of course the soldiers can’t contain themselves and beat the guy to a pulp. Astonishing to see that literally everything that makes this scene work was copied from an episode of The Sopranos. It could have been a quote, a nod to David Chase. That is if the entire movie didn’t consist of these homages.

The problems Leo encounters are similar to the ones Dave Kleinfeld (Sean Penn) has to deal with in Carlito’s Way. The lawyer who cannot resist the temptations a counselor of a mob boss is exposed to. Women, money and power. When the French feds close in on him, Anger tries to heighten the sense of suspense in a series of unconvincing scenes in which Leo pulls all sorts of stupid spy-stuff in the presence of hardened criminals. But of course, the lawyer turned James Bond, gets away with everything.

The film finishes with another imitation. Leo doesn’t actually say, “I am an average nobody…get to live the rest of my life like a schnook”, the way the Henry Hill-character does in Goodfellas, he just says the same thing using different words, like school kids do when plucking information of the Internet to write essays for homework.

Was I entertained? Yes, but the problem was that I was entertained by participating in a sort of film quiz, almost hitting an imaginary buzzer giving my answer to the question “From which movie was this scene?” I kept waiting for the scene in which Leo would wake up to discover a horse’s head in his bed. Maybe Anger didn’t see that one.

Rating: **

Actor John C. Reilly in Locarno

Image: M. Demir

The 63rd edition of the Festival del Film Locarno pays tribute to American actor John C. Reilly with the screening of five movies he's starring in (Boogie Nights, Walk Hard, Hard Eight, Stepbrothers and the European premiere of his latest movie Cyrus). Yesterday John C. Reilly treated a small audience at the Spazio Cinema to entertaining stories about his collaboration with some of Hollywood’s most legendary directors such as Martin Scorsese, Terrence Mallick and Robert Altman.

Review: Pietro (Italy, 2010) - Concorso Internazionale

Image courtesy of Festival del Film Locarno

Pietro is an Italian 28 year old man, born on the night Italy won the world cup, living with his junkie brother Francesco, in a run-down apartment his parents left them on the outskirts of Italy's industrial centre, Turin. Pietro has all the odds against him in life. He appears to have some mental inability, which is never clarified in the film. But it is so over-acted by Pietro Casella, the lead, that I was waiting for a box of matches to fall and having Pietro saying “265 matches on the floor, 265 matches on the floor”.

The movie, directed by Daniel Gaglianone starts with the following title: 1. Emporio Armani, only to see that a group of kids bullying a tramp in the subway steal a Emporio Armani bag of the guy. A useless title. To my disappointment the whole movie is constructed by this kind of obvious titles, which do not add anything valuable to the narrative. Pietro looks in disgust at the violence the kids inflict on the tramp, and flees the scene because he is powerless in the situation. The film focuses on the moral decay of Italian society, where everybody is against everybody. And the weak, like Pietro, being the first victims of the harshness of contemporary Italian society. Every scene is made to make clear that people nowadays are nasty, but to be frank, the director repeats himself so often, that it actually becomes a farce instead of brutal reality. His brother repeatedly insults him; his brother’s friends treat him like a clown in every single scene; his shady boss, who pays him for leafleting, is always mistreating him. Every character is one-dimensional in this pic. “Normal” people are bad people without a heart and the mentally disabled are automatic saints, like the girl he meets at work.

To distract the audience of the limitations of the script, Gaglianone indulges himself in cinematic tricks which are supposedly there to enhance the cold outside world Pietro is experiencing, but are superfluous. The screen goes black, sound goes off, goes back on, for no apparent reasons. The only time it works in the film is when Pietro takes the girl from his work to a club with his brother and his shady friends. Here he feels so trapped and humiliated by them (everybody touches his girlfriend in ways they shouldn’t) that the music the club is playing gets louder and louder in Pietro’s head to convey his panic.

The scene in the club is the key scene in the film. Something snaps in Pietro. We’ve seen this all before. Remember Sling Blade? Also a film in which a victim, a mentally challenged naive man is at the focal point facing harsh conditions and mean people. But it is a more realistic portrait. Not all “normal” people are bad guys, and Billy Bob Thornton’s character in Sling Blade has got some mean streaks too. Three-dimensional characters and one-dimensional ones are the difference between this good American film and this lousy attempt of Italian cinematic social critique.

One sees the attempt of Gaglianone but there are to many flaws in this movie, and that’s why the director fails to bring across this reality of moral decay in modern-day Italian cities.

Rating: *

Joseph McBride talks to Strongman Sandow on Ernst Lubitsch

Ernst Lubitsch Retrospective

This year the Festival del Film Locarno pays tribute to German-born director Ernst Lubitsch (1892-1947) with a retrospective. His oeuvre consists of To Be or not to Be, Ninotchka, and Heaven can wait, just to name a few. By many perceived as the inventor of the romcom (romantic comedy), Lubitsch caught the attention of Hollywood after a highly prolific career as an actor and director of comedy and lavish period pieces in Germany. In Hollywood his craftsmanship was so appreciated that his style became known as the Lubitsch Touch.

Joseph McBride, is an American screenwriter, professor on film and writer of several books on American film directors – such as Orson Welles, Steven Spielberg, Frank Capra and John Ford. He is invited by the Festival del Film Locarno to hold an introduction to Lubitsch-films. Joseph McBride talked to Strongman Sandow about the Lubitsch touch, German vs. US-Lubitsch and the influence of Lubitsch on American cinema.

Review La vida sublime (Spain, 2010)

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The Spanish Civil War between 1936 and 1939 left a lot of scar tissue on Spanish society. So much so that even a Spanish director born in 1975 still uses the medium of film to get to terms with that past. The inspiration for this film lies in the grandfather of director Daniel V. Villamediana. In his speech before the screening he talked about the mysterious years of his grandfather during the civil war in the deep south of Spain, Andalucía. He refused to talk about those years that fuelled the mystery and speculation in the family. La vida sublime is a loving tribute to his grandfather's generation who after the Civil War never got a chance to fulfill its dreams, unlike the director's generation.

In La vida sublime Victor, a young man in his early thirties has a dialogue with a relative on the vast wheat plains of Valladolid in the Castile region about his grandfather, nicknamed El Cuco, who just like the directors grandfather went to the South and returned to never speak about that period again. This is the first of a series of delightful dialogues with different characters throughout the movie. The dialogues are extremely long but never dull, because one can sense that most of it is improvisation. Indeed, when I asked the director at the Q and A if this was so, he confirmed that the lead only was told what to talk about whereupon the other actors and amateurs, as I discovered, would respond as they liked. This technique really makes dialogue more realistic and makes one feel to be a silent partner of the conversation, like a child listening to the grown-ups in a sense. At one point he says to his relative that he needs a passion in his life. This passion translates in a sort of road movie where in Victor follows the footsteps of his grandfather on his journey to the south of Spain. He even goes as far as imitating certain things his grandfather did. Dangerous things, like eating 90 sardines, because granddad did so in a bet years earlier, and bullfighting. Passion and danger is what Victor needs. During a dialogue with a bullfighter in Seville he actually says that a man has to expose himself to danger to make life sublime. The bullfighter nods.

El Cuco takes on mystical proportions in the mind of Victor, but there is an undercurrent in this mystification. Victor has a long, political talk with Pepe, a relative in Seville, in which it becomes clear that El Cuco was an anarchist during the Civil War years. Pepe goes to great lengths to explain why Victor shouldn’t be so proud about this fact. One learns a great deal about recent Spanish history while watching this film, and how Spanish people nowadays deal with that tormented, divided past.

Another delightful feature of this film is the way it portrays two different regions in Spain: Castile in the North and Andalucía in the South. Castile consists of endless fields of wheat and just one color: ochre. It’s so monotonous that Victor says that as a child he used to dream in ochre. Few people are seen. Andalucía on the other hand is vibrant and warm in it’s color scheme, Seville is crowded and the shots of Cadiz even more to the south than Seville, show us nothing but white buildings blazing in the sun and the azure blue of the sea. At one point the image of Cadiz from the sky gets all distorted and hazy as if we, the viewers, are suffering from sunstroke. Heavenly organ music is heard as if to emphasize the almost saintly qualities of the landscapes that Villamediana obviously loves.

This is a film Hemingway would have loved. A man on a quest for passion and danger, discovering the Spanish soul on his search. Elvis sang Well, I’ve never been to Spain. Neither have I. But after seeing La vida sublime I can’t wait to go.

Rating: ***

Director of "The Fourth Portrait" Mong-Hong Chung at Festival del Film Locarno

Image: M. Demir

Review: The Fourth Portrait (Taiwan, 2010)

Image courtesy of Festival del Film Locarno

The Fourth Portrait, directed by Mong-Hong Chung, starts with a very touching scene. Xiang, our protagonist, bears witness of his father’s death in a Taiwan hospital bed. The doctor and nurse leave the ten-year-old boy alone with his dying father and ask him coldly to call them when he finally expires. Xiang puts a napkin on his father’s mouth so he can see that when the napkin stops moving that his father will have passed. The awareness of mind of such a young child to think of that, on such a difficult moment in his life, says everything about the intelligence of the lead character in this movie.

Xiang has no other family taking care of him. In the following scenes he walks around the Taiwan countryside with menacing plumes of toxic smoke coming out of mega factories in the background, eating his meals at home in total solitude. He also draws at night; we only see a glimpse of his first portrait.

The only contact he makes is with the janitor of his school, who is hard on him but in a good way, at least feeding the boy and giving him advice on life. He calls the man who is not related to him grandfather; this shows how much he misses a normal family.

He still has family though, his mother who hasn’t seen her child since he was seven. She comes to collect Xiang after the death of his father, reluctantly though. When the train they’re on speeds in to the blackness of the tunnel in an ingenious shot, it felt like an omen of doom. This feeling is enhanced by the encounter between Xiang and his stepfather, who chillingly receives him and mouths him off at the very first meal they have together. The director Mong-Hong Chung shows his craft in the color scheme in these scenes. The apartment of his stepfather is dominated by a big fish tank in which many little fish grow, giving the whole place a cool, blue feel that emphasizes the coldness of the stepfather. Chung also uses a warm yellow lamp over the dining table as the family sits to eat to enhance the longing of Xiang for a normal family life.

The second portrait is inspired by another curious character in this film. A petty criminal full of life who makes Xiang even accomplice of his crimes. He’s a bit crazy but seems to be the only one to understand young Xiang. Scenes with Big Gun, as he names himself, are very funny. But he is a bad role model, contrary to the benevolent and wise school janitor.

The narrative gets darker with the arrival of the third portrait, inspired by a dream about his older brother who went missing three years earlier and the discovery of his mother’s profession, when he visits her at “work”. This portrait unchains a series of macabre incidents and ultimately will lead to a fourth portrait.

Chung stated in an interview about the film that he always toyed with the idea about making a movie about a child during a few months in it’s life, because he’s fascinated with the vast imagination of children. He pulls it off, and not only that, the story is also an allegory of modern Taiwan (as the director noted in an Q and A after screening) where the society is in turmoil while in search of its identity, much like the protagonist. This sense of alienation is also conveyed in the depiction of the present day Taiwan. Nature is rapidly being taken over by industrialization and urbanization. It must also be said that the kid actor, Xiao-Hai Bi, does a fantastic job of conveying an innocent but troubled youth.

I really got involved in the movie by its delicate touch and the storyline that propels one to that fourth portrait, that very important fourth portrait. The Fourth Portrait ends as it began: touching. I got the chance to shake hands with Mong-Hong Chung and heard myself saying, “Great movie, thanks”.

Rating: ***

Review: Au fond des bois (Opening Film)

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The premise of this movie is fascinating. The movie itself is not. The premise: Rural France 1865. A young middle class girl, Josephine Hughes gets abducted by a vagabond with hypnotic powers and is brutally raped and abused. In the court case that follows (a news article about this case was the inspiration) an interesting point arises. Was the girl really hypnotised or was she willing to go “deep in the woods” with this mysterious boy named Timothée Castellan. Fascinating, right?

Not in the hands of Benoît Jacquot. This acclaimed French director managed to make a tedious, conventional and most unforgivingly, boring movie out of this material. An accomplishment in itself. Au fond des bois opens in the arena of the Ardèche, a wild region in the middle of France. It is very clear that the director wants to make a character of the landscape, by emphasising on it in a shot of Josephine with her back towards the camera, which very much remind the paintings of Casper David Friedrich, the German Romantic painter who’s very work concentrates on individuals confronted with the enormity and beauty of savage nature. This notion, nature as a character never takes off besides this very shot I’m describing. The Ardèche simply becomes a wood that never is involved in the story line after this emblematic shot. Then why use such an iconic reference from art history?

There is a scene, at the beginning in which the wanderer, pretending to be a mute, wins the sympathy of the father of the girl, Doctor Hughes that is so condensed to the point of getting ridiculous. Within two minutes the hobo with black teeth coming straight from nowhere in an isolated area is adopted by a seemingly intelligent doctor. This is where the director has lost me, and the movie became an exercise in patience. The reason being that he repeatedly does the same thing in the movie over and over again. The viewer gets to see far too many short scenes in which he has to assume almost everything. The boy circles his finger over a glass of wine, BANG! She’s hypnotised. After being raped I don’t remember how many times she wraps her arms around the tramp while he’s savagely penetrating her, BANG! She’s in love. She awakes in the morning, BANG! She’s out of hypnosis, like she drank too much Hypnosia the night before and awakes sober in the morning with a massive hangover. Come on!

The movie ends with a court case scene (on which the movie is based but lasts about 3 minutes) that does not add anything to the narrative. She smiles at him, but sends him to prison. What does anyone has to make out of that?

The director stated on stage while introducing this film that his inspiration came from the court case against Timothée Castellan. Now there are many movies based on court cases. Personally, I love them because of the exciting nature of these films, guilty or not? The very fabric of this kind of movies is an element of suspense and a search for the truth. Think Rashomon by Kurosawa or The Crucible by Hytner, which successfully builds suspense and excitement around the court case about presumed supernatural powers, contrary to the court scene in Au fond des bois. This film lacks that element of suspense. I should have been on the edge of my seat at the all- revealing court scene, instead of slumped in it praying this movie soon would be over.

Festival del Film Locarno officially opened

Image: M. Demir

Yesterday evening at the Piazza Grande, the 63rd edition of the Festival del Film Locarno was officially opened. After a few welcoming words in Italian, French, German and English by Locarno’s elegant mayor Carla Spezzali, the festivals president Marco Solari introduced the new artistic director of the festival, Olivier Père. The young and dynamic Père emphasized that also this edition of the festival is concentrating on young directors, with twenty first films being shown. But, he continued, the festival is always equally welcoming the more established film directors. Benoit Jacquot, the French director of the opening film Au fond des bois is one of them.

Benoit Jacquot and the Argentinian actor Nahuel Perez Biscayart, the lead in Au fond des bois, justifiably admit that a world premiere at the Piazza Grande in front of an audience of 8,000 people is very intimidating. But then again, the Piazza Grande must be one of the most spectacular venues for showing a movie. The setting is impressive, with one of the biggest open-air screens in Europe, watching a movie with 8,000 viewers on an old piazza with the Swiss Alps in the background is quite an experience. Right before the opening speeches, portraits of directors are projected to the old buildings surrounding the piazza. We see Lubitsch, Haneke, Godard and many other legendary directors. When the opening speeches are being held, leopard motifs (the leopard is the symbol of the festival) are projected to the same buildings. It is a grand setting, but the atmosfere is very intimate and very exciting.

Strongman Sandow is visiting the Festival del film Locarno