Our men in Locarno

Two persepctives from the annual Swiss film festival.

Aug 18 2006

'Miami Vice' opened the fifty-ninth Locarno Film Festival, outdoors on Europe's biggest screen: a high-profile start from incoming director Frédérique Maire. The film was actually atypical of his selection, which mainly favoured relatively unknown directors: besides making the Cinéastes du Présent strand competitive, he focused even more closely than had Irene Bignardi on films from Switzerland and its neighbours France, Italy and Germany.

It paid off in terms of German-language fare. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's 'The Lives of Others', a dark, compelling drama set during the last years of East Germany's communist regime and centred on a surveillance agent for Stasi, the State police, who is spying on a famous playwright and his actress wife. Part thriller, part psychological study, part moral disquisition, the film is beautifully acted and shot, alert to the cruel ironies afflicting both spy and victims, and feels Melvillean in its mapping of a murky universe of deceit, betrayal and subterranean codes of honour. A hit in Germany, it should find a British distributor.

That's sadly less likely for Stefan Westervelle's 'While You Are Here', an elegant, intriguing study of a fragile gay relationship, but it'd be a pleasant surprise if someone released Switzerland's 'Das Fräulein', another first feature of great assurance, subtlety and intelligence (and winner of the Golden Leopard). Charting the blossoming friendship between a fortysomething who left Yugoslavia for Zurich years ago and a carefree, outgoing young Bosnian who gets a job at the older woman's canteen, Andrea Staka touches on various topics – sisterhood among women of different ages, community and differences between exiles, the need to take risks sometimes – in a light, pacy, engagingly unsentimental fashion. A fine script and expert performances help no end.

'The Lives of the Saints' could have done with more of the latter; the first feature from Rankin and Chris Cottam, it suffers most of all from a larger-than-life turn from James Cosmo as a Mr Big of Green Lanes. Still, Tony Grisoni's tale of an angelic-looking infant bringing chaos and conflict into the lives of various colourful Haringey types tends towards the fabular with its poetic-demotic dialogue and meditations on the meaning of life. Uneven, sometimes clumsy, it's ambitious and different, which in a British film is welcome.

Ambition and freshness were also evident in two Iranian films: Saman Salour's low-budget 'A Few Kilos of Dates for a Funeral', about two lovelorn losers operating a remote gas station, had enough bizarre, black wit to resemble Beckett and early Polanski, while Asghar Farhadi's far more polished 'Fireworks Wednesday', about a bride-to-be drawn into the painful battles of a couple who hire her as a cleaner, constantly manages to intrigue and surprise. Both, too, are nothing like most Iranian fare seen in the West; the second, especially, is quietly virtuoso melodrama. Let’s hope it reaches UK screens.

Geoff Andrew

Elsewhere, 23-year-old Amber Tamblyn netted the best actress prize as the lead in 'Stephanie Daley'; not the least of her achievements was passing as a character almost a decade younger than herself. In fact Hilary Brougher's brittle, thorny character piece is more or less a two-hander: schoolgirl Stephanie is being prosecuted for the murder of a baby she insists she didn't know she was carrying; Tilda Swinton is the court-appointed psychologist who interviews her. Shot in snowy, small-town New York state, it's bracingly ambiguous with an eye for teenage peer pressure and insidious religiosity, strongly anchored in those two lead performances.

There was also a showing for 'Lights in the Dusk', the final part of Aki Kaurismäki's loose trilogy of deadbeat musings. A James M Cain-type intrigue about a loser tricked into being fall guy for a robbery, the film is executed with a sardonic, dry-as-dust humour that counts as understated even for Kaurismäki.
Other British entries included 'Severance' (out here next week), director Christopher Smith's follow-up to 'Creep'. The setting is an abandoned lodge deep in the Hungarian woods to which employees of a British arms manufacturer have come for a team-building weekend. There's something nasty in the woodshed, of course – crazed former Eastern bloc shock troops, it seems, with a grudge against the firm. It follows the recent trend for plentiful and gleefully sadistic torture scenes, but also shows a good grip of suspense technique and wrings a few class-conscious laughs out of its group dynamics, though the laddish tone and crass political satire didn't do much for me.

There was a strong presence for Asian cinema, especially in the new Play Forward section. Directors from the region are increasingly embracing portmanteau features as a way to place shorter works in an international context; one package of new digital work included offerings from Pen-Ek Ratanaruang and Eric Khoo, while another featured Apichatpong Weerasethakul's 'Worldy Desires', a typically drifting mesmeric reverie on the jungle and the process of filmmaking.

This year's Leopard of Honour lifetime achievement award went to Russian filmmaker Aleksandr Sokurov, creator of 'Russian Ark' and 'The Sun'. His latest documentary, 'Elegy of Life', received its world premiere, though its two-part structure seemed more televisual than filmic. A double portrait of the 50-year marriage of Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, it traces through their lives some fibres of the country's deep, fractured recent history as well as evincing a delight in music and art itself – a suitably rousing sentiment for any
festival.

Ben Walters

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