Locarno 2006

Geoff Andrew reports from the high-profile Swiss festival.

Aug  7 2006

The 59th Locarno Film Festival opened last Wednesday with a screening of Michael Mann's 'Miami Vice' in the Piazza Grande, the ready-made open-air venue that boasts the biggest screen in Europe. Though the writer-director was unable to attend in person, it was a suitably high-profile opening to the first edition of the festival programmed by its new artistic director, Frederique Maire.

In other respects, however, the movie was far from typical of Maire's selection, which appears to place a greater emphasis than that of his predecessor Irene Bignardi on new and low-budget work by relatively obscure or unfamiliar directors.

In addition to the existing International Competition, Maire has added a prize for the category Cineastes of the Present, as well as focussing even more more closely than in previous years on work made in Switzerland and its neighbours France, Italy and Germany.

So far that has paid off at least in terms of German-language fare. From Germany itself came Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's 'The Lives of Others', a sombre but very fine drama set during the last years of East Germany's communist regime. It centres on a hitherto diligent lieutenant working for Stasi, the State's secret surveillance agency, who at the behest of the Minister of Culture are keeping an eye and ear on a successful playwright and his actress wife.

Part thriller, part psychological study, part dark moral fable, the film is beautifully acted, sensitively shot, and profoundly alert to the cruel ironies that surround the predicament not only of the spied-upon but of the man watching them. To both our and his surprise, he finds his sense of ethics undermined and revitalised.

The movie feels almost Melvillean in its assured exploration of a murky underworld of deceit, betrayal and unexpected codes of honour. It's been a hit in Germany, and hopefully should find a British distributor.

It would be a pleasant surprise if that were to be the case with the Swiss film 'Das Fraulein', also a first feature of confidence, subtlety and intelligence. Andrea Staka's film concerns the blossoming friendship between Rusza, a fortysomething Zurich restaurateur who left her native Yugoslavia two decades ago, and Ana, a seemingly carefree and outgoing Bosnian in her early twenties who gets a casual job helping out at Rusza's canteen.

The girl's vitality and kindness bring her deeply defensive and remote boss out of her shell - but not without conflict and confusion. The film touches on all manner of topics - sisterhood among women of different ages, tensions and togetherness between exiles of various origins and inclinations, the need to take risks in life while also taking care of others - in a light, pacy, affecting and engagingly unsentimental fashion.

Staka is helped by a raft of strong performances and a script on which she appears to have received some help from Austria's talented Barbara Albert, writer-director of 'Free Radicals' - which may present an interesting dilemma for Albert, who is on the jury for the International Competition.

These are the two finest movies I've seen so far, though the minimalist Chilean film 'Anger' - an ultra low-budget look at two days in the life of a young woman being repeatedly interviewed for secretarial jobs - has many fine moments amidst its longueurs, and Britain's 'The Lives of the Saints' is far from being without interest. The first feature co-directed by Rankin and Chris Cottam, the movie charts how the discovery of an angelic-looking young infant affects the relationships of a Green Lanes crime lord, his stepson and his girlfriend, the stepson's underachieving mate, and a runner doing errands not only for Mr Big but for the local
priest.

The script by Tony Grisoni tends towards the fabular, with poetic-demotic dialogue, meditations on the purpose of life, and odd ellipses. To be perfectly frank, the movie is uneven - James Cosmo's scenery-chewing turn as the brutal but sentimental Mr Big-figure often overwhelms the narrative - and occasionally clumsy, but it is also ambitious and different. Whatever its shortcomings, rather this than another bland romcom or Guy Ritchie rip-off.

'The Lives of Saints' is extremely watchable compared to some other films in Locarno - Canada's 'Black Eyed Dog', Spain's 'One Franco, 14 Pesetas' spring immediately to mind. Those films simply had one yearning for a less dutiful work schedule, whereby one could simply ignore all the new releases and immerse oneself instead in the Aki Kaurismaki retrospective.

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