Locarno Film Festival round-up

Geoff Andrew yodels a report back from Switzerland.

Aug 16 2005

As ever at the Locarno Film Festival, it was hard to resist the temptation simply to lap up a lovely retrospective – this year's was a celebration of Orson Welles – or to revisit older movies shown in tribute to a slew of honorary award winners including Abbas Kiarostami, Terry Gilliam, Wim Wenders, Susan Sarandon, John Malkovich and producer Jeremy Thomas.

Still, exploring new fare is what the gig's about, and this year's festival lived up to its reputation for offering a mostly rewarding selection of modest but satisfying films.

There are always plenty of continental entries, and this year Germany came up trumps with a couple of fine movies. Yilmaz Arslan's 'Fratricide' is about two young Kurds trying to survive economic hardship and violent aggression from Turkish gangsters. It may err towards sensationalism but its toughness is tempered by intelligence.

Similarly good was Isabelle Stever's 'Gisela', in which a married supermarket cashier's affair with a local slacker attracts unwelcome attention from his sociopathic buddy. It boasts an admirably non-judgmental, matter-of-fact authenticity reminiscent of Fassbinder's 'Katzelmacher'.

It wasn't just Europe that produced talents this year. Chilean Matias Bize's motel-room two-hander 'In Bed', Tunisian Nacer Khemir's visually and musically resplendent Sufi fable 'Bab'Aziz' (shown in an impressive Maghrebi round-up) and 'A Perfect Day', a compelling study of grief from the Lebanese duo Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, were all insightful and enjoyable.

Still, perhaps the most welcome surprise was not one but two French Canadian movies well worth catching.

Admittedly, Louise Archambaut's 'Familia', about the relationship between two very different friends – an inveterate gambling addict and the ultra-organised designer who warily agrees to put her up for a while – is promising but patchy rather than a fully convincing study of obsessive behaviour, but it certainly has pace and flair.

Altogether more sombre but more impressive was Bernard Émond's 'La Neuvaine', which deals with the encounter between a middle-aged doctor traumatised by a murderous incident and a young shop assistant who inadvertently prevents her from committing suicide while he himself is attempting, through prayer, to postpone his ailing grandmother's death.

A cool, calm, unsentimental but moving study of disillusionment and faith, guilt and goodness, it's as unfashionable a film as may now be found, but it transcends such concerns to embrace life and death in all of its messy complexity.

Finally, Britain also fielded a strong line-up. The Quay Brothers' long-awaited second feature, 'The Piano Teacher of Earthquakes', with Amira Casar as a beautiful opera singer spirited off to a remote island by Gottfried John's sinister alienist and automaton-inventor, is visually and aurally stunning, a typically eccentric Gothic fantasy with a sultry atmosphere that is perhaps a little too languid for the film's good.

More down to earth is the Amber Collective's slice of social realism, 'Shooting Magpies', another of their politically astute and powerful accounts of the deleterious effects of unemployment, poverty and other modern ills – most notably heroin – on working-class life in and around Durham.

Mike Figgis' 'COMA' is the almost inevitably uneven but often fascinating record/result of a film-making masterclass he conducted in Slovenia, slightly reminiscent of Nick Ray's 'We Can't Go Home Again'.

But best of the lot was Dave McKean's first feature, 'Mirrormask' (written with Neil Gaiman), which makes marvellously inventive use of both digital animation and live action to turn a teenage girl's feelings of guilt about her mother's illness into a funny, frightening and absolutely engrossing odyssey into a weird and wonderful darklands populated by all manner of bizarre beings.

A terrific addition to the tradition of films that includes the likes of 'Time Bandits' and 'Brazil', it boasts an extraordinarily strong lead performance from Stephanie Leonidas (currently on our screens in 'Yes'); trust me, this young woman will go far.

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