Five not so easy pieces

In a conversation conducted by Jean-Philippe de Tonac (published in the book Do not hope to get rid of the book - translated from French by Miodrag Marković, published by Gradac), Jean-Claude Carrière and Umberto Eco also talked about film, so Eco also highlighted his thoughts on the subject: "[…] when the State is too powerful, poetry becomes silent. When the State is in great crisis, as was the case with Italy in the post-war period, art is free to say what needs to be said. The great age of neorealism arose at a time when Italy was in disarray. We have not yet entered the era of the so-called Italian miracle (that is, the industrial and market renovations of the 1950s)... Therefore, when power begins to weaken, certain arts find an incentive in it, while others do not". If we replace, with a little self-given freedom, the concept of the State and Italy with the concept of the world, and then focus on today and the state of things in film and cinematography, and purposefully narrow the visor to the offer of the recently ended Author's Film Festival in Belgrade, where for the purposes of this quick and summary presentation we will point out the quality of several notable titles from prime program selections, we could easily come to an analogy with Ek's observation made above. Especially since naturalism (essentially characteristic of the so-called Italian neorealism on film) is also present as a common content in all five movies which will be discussed here.

photo: faf / promo

The most symptomatic is the film that is also the first to be awarded at the FAF - Everything we imagine as light (All We Imagine as Light), co-produced by France, India, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Italy, Switzerland, the USA and Belgium, was also crowned with the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival (where it had its world premiere), was subsequently awarded all over the world, and in recent days has been at the top of the otherwise colorful the list of the best achievements of the year is coming to an end. Namely, this film is at the same time a fascinating and very disturbing work; the story of the everyday life of two humble nurses in a hospital in an Indian megalopolis, one of whom is estranged from her husband who has been living in Germany for a long time, and herself may be on the threshold of a new, at that moment extremely vague romance, while the other, slightly younger, is entangled into a secret relationship with an unfaithful young man, it is a kind of "coward's egg". This is a film that, at the level of craftsmanship, has nothing to complain about, of course, if it is initially understood as an offshoot of the slower-moving arthouse current (the so-called slow cinema), but what the director Payal Kapadia (1986) has offered us here is worrying, which is a typical and highly calculated European film set and implemented in an Indian reality context, as a result of which the depiction of life in India (of course, in those social circles and spheres) in this film can also be seen as the dutiful performance of a self-imposed task porn exoticism (that is, a pornographically exaggerated depiction of misery and poverty in exotic locations, in accordance with the preferences and now ingrained habits of the Western audience, and this is a pattern that Serbian and regional authors often resort to in an effort to please the selectors of more popular film festivals and break into the official programs of those prestigious film festivals).

There is nothing authentic and unadulterated in this (relatively speaking Indian) film, all the necessary elements of the aforementioned film genre are carefully observed and present in the unofficially prescribed ratio, only that, as a breath of freshness, that formula has been moved to the Indian context, with the fact that with a fair amount of benevolent blindness, it can also be viewed as a higher concept, in the sense of underlining the universality of the daily life of insignificant civilians all over the planet, and it is only a construct that constantly needs to question. In the very ending, the author tries to muddy the waters a bit, and the ending itself also brings a thoroughly calculated short escape from realism, but then it is too late for this film as a whole. Make no mistake, this is an example of film craft in an undeniably higher class of performance, but this achievement is irritatingly calculated to such an extent that it is really difficult to tolerate and justify such a pronounced measure of calculation, even mercantilism among the fringes of film as an art form.

photo: faf / promo

Things are much better for the film, which also picked up the most seen festival awards at this year's FAF; Romanian (actually, Romanian-Serbian) The New Year that never came it brings retro chic in a kind of distorted mirror, and it is also interesting because of the apparently contradictory items that it unites in its definitely dense conceptual weave. To simplify, screenwriter and director Bogdan Muresanu places his composite picture with several equally important protagonists (and precisely from the ranks of the already mentioned insignificant civilians) in the last days of Ceausescu's dictatorship, more precisely in the days of Christmas there in 1989. The eyes (and, of course, the minds) are particularly struck by the distance that Muresanu makes in relation to the already rich tradition of the New Romanian Film, and his film, created from numerous evidences of arthouse sophistication and intentions, finds its primary origin in the communicative combination of dramedy ( therefore, dramas and comedies), with a noticeable influence of the American experience of that scene. In this regard, the dramaturgical concept can most quickly be described as what we remember from the famous, and in our country, highly influential Altman's Short cuts, while in the script-director's care and kindness towards the characters, analogies can be made with the approach nurtured by Ljubiša Kozomara and Gordan Mihić in the local black wave (all the more significant that this particular film won the "Gordan Mihić" for the best screenplay). Muresana firmly holds the reins over this social chronicle of a world that has just about collapsed, and from beginning to end the uniform tone and accompanying rhythm of the narration has been maintained, which is certainly a compelling reason for another unequivocal praise. The reconstruction of the era is also impressive, and the choice of the "cubic" aspect of the raids of the picture (30:4) additionally emphasizes the claustrophobia of the strictly controlled chaos of the prescribed single-mindedness, and all this is this film, which, with all the aforementioned, is really funny, funny, and charming. , and pitak, additionally loved by the local audience, which was pampered by the ease of recognizing the work of ours now and here. The only obstacle on the way of this film to a stable high position in some future history of Romanian cinema of this century is the fact that it perhaps too harmoniously fits into the puzzle of films with a similar initial approach and attitude towards the mentioned era, some of which take place in those same days. those same breakthrough years.

photo: faf / promo

The Norwegian-Dutch-German-Swedish-British left an even more striking impression Armand, which reached us with a recommendation in the form of the Golden Camera Award (debut award) of the Cannes Film Festival, followed by a factual and biographical statement - Halfdan Ullman Tondel is the grandson of Liv Ullman and Ingmar Bergman. Just mentioned aside, his Armand captures the freshness of "already well-known notes". Namely, the plot starts very similar to the procedure known from the increasingly influential television drama series A slap (Slap) - after a violent incident, the mother of a small bully and the parents of his victim meet with the teacher and the top management of the school in order to reach some kind of solution to that slippery problem, following all those mostly wordless and mostly fruitless procedures. Ullman Tondel skillfully expands the narrative visor, and the story in an ideological sense unobtrusively and gracefully branches up to the point where the initial verism can give way to more abstract representations of the state that the incident triggered in adults and supposedly more mature people. On that track, this film outgrows its initial narrative and conceptual framework, and slightly deviating from the path of nightmarish oneirism, it reaches a full and disturbing picture of a world that is falling apart while its inhabitants (economically more prosperous, but still certainly insignificant civilians) sink deeper and deeper into the sludge of dealing with ephemera, detailism and technicalities, additionally burdened with the habits and horrors of reborn political correctness. Armand is extremely convincing in the portrayal of mental and psychological breakdowns, which is close to, say, Cassavetes, that great and famous poet of exactly that or those motifs in the film. To all that Armand and in its metaphorical plane, and on the path of knowingly and timely insertion of motifs of manipulation, fake news, propaganda of this or that extent, it provides a number of bases for extremely intriguing geopolitical readings (or just maybe downloads).

photo: faf / promo

On the other hand, the experienced Kirill Serebrenikov somewhat disappointed with his reading of the biographical novel (both translated and published here) by Emmanuel Carrera, who himself appears in a small acting episode, and is also present as a consultant. Limonova, it is true, brings Serebrenikov's expansiveness and confidence in leading the story and a wider ambitiously set narrative, from the film you can find out enough factually significant things about Eduard Limonov in his various life and identity changes; in addition, Ben Whishaw sovereignly rules the fundamentally deceptive character of the scandal-master who really is and was, the reconstruction of the era is impeccable in the appearance aspect of that term, there are also a couple of operatic wide and sweeping kinesthetic sequences for unquestionable praise... However, on the other hand, we have a couple of more valid grounds for objection - it is not clear why (unclear exclusively in the kinesthetic and cinematographic sense) parts in the Soviet Union (and the latter Russian Federation) take place in "ironed" English instead of the far more suitable Russian, while, as the film approaches the end, Serebrinkov changes himself on the fly, showing more and more poisonous and completely unnecessary cynicism towards his main actor. In this sense, a confusing conclusion is reached - the key author spent almost two and a half hours to finally show us that the main "hero" of the film The story of Eduard Limonov in fact, it was not worth so much effort and attention. This is then followed by the impression that Serebrenikov gave up on what Carrera's reading clearly suggested - more courage is needed to understand than to problematize, and at the very end of the film he adds Zicher's courting of the Western audience, for whom it is obviously big money and audience needs this film first and foremost. In this respect, it's a real shame, because there will hardly be any new attempts to adapt the same masterful prose to the screen any time soon.

photo: faf / promo

My personal favorite in this division is the Brazilian-German-French erotic thriller Motel Destino of the local cinematographer Karim Ajnuz, once awarded at the Belgrade FEST (for the film Invisible life). He places his most current film in the aesthetic microuniverse of the above-mentioned subgenre dominant in the offer at the end of the last century, in a consistent performance in terms of respect for legality, and clearly defined and strengthened by the always colorful Brazilian context. The dramatic flywheel itself - a young criminal on the run from a ruthless gangster finds temporary refuge in a remote motel for the erotic escapades of the not-too-wealthy and modest, where he falls into the web of intrigues of the married couple who run this colorful palace of vice and hedonism without reservation - reveals inspiration, and that is a movie The postman always rings twice., and before that Kane's novel, from which both of those certainly very valid films arose. Ainuz builds on that setting not only with local color, but also with a bolder depiction of the difficulty of the burden of travel, and then creates a story in which everything is possible - both an inevitable tragedy and perhaps some kind of happy ending for those who, in the final analysis, still deserve it. In addition, like, for example, Gaspar Noe in his best directorial works, he manages to create a peculiar and striking illusion of a world in which such a rudimentary plot is still possible on the one hand, and on the other so fascinating to watch, follow and in the rapture of the audience, study. Many people do not manage to do that these days, and it will not be that this is a consequence of the world, which is perhaps not falling apart fast enough, and therefore does not inspire artistic creation to an insufficient extent.