A neat line of shops appears on screen, billboards sparkle on the walls and the vibrant technicolour of the Sixties almost gives us a sense of peace. It looks like a typical post-war American city, quiet and geometric, maybe too much. The narrating voice asks, “What are we looking at?” and a doubt awakens in us: the buildings are as fake as panels of a set design, the roads look as if they’ve never been walked on, the paint on the signs is new and shiny. This is Riotsville, one of the fake cities built by the American government in the Sixties as military training bases. In these cities, crowds of plain-clothes soldiers staged riots, complete with an audience and cheers, so that their colleagues could learn how to contain them, all in preparation for the civil rights protests that would unleash in the Summer.
Michi (Chieko Baishô) evokes memories of her past over the phone: she goes through her life with great melancholy, and she appears grateful to have someone to listen to her. Nothing but her own voice can be heard in her kitchen. On the end of the phone, we find Yoko (Yumi Kawai). She is much younger than her and she remains silent. Even though she would be interested in the old woman’s story, her head is elsewhere. A sudden alarm interrupts Michi’s flow of words: her time is up. Yoko is holding back tears. Eventually Yoko explains to her what will happen the next day and she keeps begging her not to do “it”. Michi hushes “Sayonara.”
Carlos hangs up the phone and leans against the wall. His eyes are glazed over and he would like to vent but he doesn’t because, as he says, “men don’t cry.” This is the conflict that Un Varón, Fabian Hernández’s new film, sets out to investigate: that of a young man who tries to conform to the ideal of masculinity that prevails on the streets of Bogotá while in private he just wants to be himself. Christmas is approaching and his only wish is to spend it with his increasingly elusive sister and his mother, who is in jail. Leaving the youth center that took him in, he finds himself coming to terms with street life and the law of the alpha male.
Carlo Rivolta was a young talent of Italian journalism during the ’77 protest movements, a figure unknown to most, yet capable of describing firsthand the upheavals of this historical period. The crisis of ideologies, the internal clashes of the movement and, above all, the spread of heroin that condemned him, and an entire generation, to an untimely demise.
The main difference between us and History is that History does not speak, but we force it to do so. What would happen, however, if it looked us in the face, took us by the hand and started making small talk, telling us about its regrets and pipe dreams? This is exactly what Aleksandr Sokurov’s “Fairytale” aims for: to make History speak spontaneously, quietly and with a hint of humour.
Adolf Hitler, Iosif Stalin, Benito Mussolini and Winston Churchill find themselves reunited in the afterlife, chatting as they wander through a dark, foggy forest, waiting for the gatekeeper to decide whether to let them into heaven. What about the content of these conversations? Despite their different languages, they mock each other while asserting their political and social ideals. Their speeches focus on their private dimension and therefore erase the aura given by their public function and by History itself. Words thus serve as a tool to reconcile the different points of view and as an attempt to overcome the past and the crystallised image we have of these historical figures. Built through archive footage and without the use of deep-fakes or other artificial intelligence tools, the film calls into question the relationship with reality, verisimilitude, memory and the demythologisation of these personalities. This is an objective that could not have been pursued by using actors to replace the faces, bodies and gestures that changed history. Moreover, the voices lent to the protagonists are perfectly given through an excellent lip-sync that breathes life into the faded images shrouded by the misty reminiscence of the past.
Sokurov seeks to make sense of the challenges that mankind is facing nowadays by taking a step back and lingering on the figures who most shaped the reality we know, namely the protagonists of World War II, the main event that eradicated positivist beliefs about human progress. Trying to empathise with figures such as Hitler and Stalin is the arduous task proposed to the viewer, who through this process realises that behind every historical event, even the most terrible and evil, there are men.
Presented and competing at the fortieth edition of Torino Film Festival, and already winner of the Camera d’Or at Cannes, competing in the Un Certain Regard section, War Pony marks the directing debut of actress Riley Keough and producer Gina Gammell, featuring an inspiring portrait of the Native American community, directly involved in the making of the film.
“Don’t murder me, okay?” With these words Lea (Lily McInerny), a 17-year-old girl, responds to the proposal of Tom (Jonathan Tucker), a man in his mid-30s, to drive her home after a bad night out with friends. The tone in which Lea utters the sentence is ironic, but her lost gaze conceals an underlying reticence. Perhaps contained in that moment of carefree interdiction is the core of Palm Trees and Power Lines, Jamie Dack’s debut feature, which has already won Best Director at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival and was presented in competition at the 40th Turin Film Festival.
The film presents a glimpse of Lea’s life during the last weeks of summer before school starts again: her everyday life in the American suburbia bores her, her friends are childish and immature, and her relationship with her mother Sandra (Gretchen Mol) – the only member of her family – is becoming more tense. Meeting Tom shakes the girl up and offers her an escape from her reality. Lea is fascinated by the fact that Tom is older but at the same time she does not let herself go completely. Tom acts like the perfect boyfriend: he woos her, gives her gifts, and takes her to the beach, but he hides a dark side that Lea decides to ignore and that will lead her to come to terms with a painful trauma in the finale.
The political intent of the film is clear but does not cloud either the form or the content. The work, in fact, deals with such edgy issues as child grooming and the difficult reality of many families in the American suburbs. Furthermore, it also features many burdensome lines, the majority of which are delegated to Lea’s character. To bring an example, she says, referring to her mother, “Some people shouldn’t have the right to have children”. At the same time, the work offers some rather unusual formal solutions of the coming-of-age drama. Jamie Dack, in fact, forgoes stylistic virtuosity to offer understated, unadulterated direction, demonstrating a desire to communicate a need, indeed an urgency in narrating certain events rather than dwelling on the visual component. The clean, static look of Dack’s camera not only offers new possibilities to the representation of the genre, but also showcases the originality of the director’s work and the courage with which she affirms a personal and authentic vision even from her first work.
It is the 27th of February 2012 when, during the eviction in Chiomonte, Luca Abbà climbs on a high-voltage pylon: the aim is to slow down the operations of expropriation carried out to widen the construction site of the tunnel, of that “great strategic work”, still pending to this day. The contact with the high-voltage cables causes him to fall ten metres. Although unconscious, his body keeps being traversed by electric shocks. He has a punctured lung. He goes into a deep coma.
Reviewing Chiusura by Alessandro Rossetti twenty-one years after its release makes the analysis of the film even more arduous. Seeing a world that doesn’t exist anymore and sensing the awareness that the world itself had that it had reached a terminal stage – the end of a millennium and all the fears attached to it – generates in the viewer a mixture of anxiety and tenderness. There is love for a fading past but, concurrently, there is the awareness that not much has changed. Even years later, the province remains a swampy, stagnant place that is difficult to escape from but, through the cinematic image, it simultaneously gains a romantic and fascinating appeal. It is precisely the ability to show this double soul of the province and this gap between fading tradition and advancing modernity that makes Alessandro Rossetto’s cinema great. Chiusura, as said by the director himself, is a film that, years later, has become a reflection of the passing of time.
The documentary, which has been restored by Istituto Luce under Rossetto’s supervision, follows the closure of Mrs. Flavia’s hair salon after 44 years of activity. The director, an anthropology graduate, carefully examines the small gestures of this world, the words of the inhabitants who inhabit it, and the conflicts which animate it. Alongside this world, there are others: the circus which comes to town and the local women’s soccer team. The observation of these worlds focuses in the same way on the imperceptible rituals and conflicts, and on the personal emotions of the people who inhabit them.
However, hovering over this microcosm is the winter fog, a constant element of the film, which amplifies the feeling of stillness and even of finality, namely the closure of a period that has come to its end. Nevertheless, what stands out is the beauty of these elements and real cinema’s ability to give charm to the things of ordinary life. The feeling of paralysis transcends and becomes beauty: personal gestures, words and speeches become captivating and fascinating in the eyes of the viewer.
Elapsed time thus amplifies the experience of viewing Chiusura, to which the reflections on time and the end of an era are added in retrospect to a period that has now passed, but whose emotions and feelings remain incredibly vivid.
Nagisa, a debut feature film by Japanese director Kogahara Takeshi, can be interpreted as a complex and layered attempt to reframe a bond, to redefine that thin filament that connects the body of those who survive and the increasingly evanescent memory of those who are no longer with us. The world that is portrayed is thus the result of a blurred mental condition, a set of indistinct reenactments created by the mind of a boy detached from reality.
The protagonist is Fuminao, a Tokyo boy tormented by guilt over the death of his younger sister Nagisa, who died three years earlier in a bus accident on her way to visit her brother. One night, the boy accompanies his friend Yuki to visit a tunnel that, according to some popular beliefs, appears to be haunted by ghosts. In this mysterious and gloomy place, he will again face his past, his origins, until he relives in his mind the intense relationship with his missing sister. The film is basically a reprise of a homonymous short film by Kogahara himself in 2017, in which the two main characters, again Fuminao and Nagisa, are two young people in love. The adolescent “love story” of the former is thus contrasted, in this second work, with the memory of a deceased person and the reminder of the faint sigh of death, in a mad dance involving Eros and Thanatos until they become part of the same being.
The protagonist’s apathy, as well as the alienation that affects his existence, arise from the strong trauma triggered by the loss of a loved one. For this reason, the young man’s life is constantly punctuated by mechanical movements and continuous silences, depicted through the use of repeated and interminable fixed shots. The story is fragmented, not at all linear, as if every shred of memory spontaneously resurfaces when Fuminao savors certain physical or emotional sensations. This makes the film a real labyrinth with no way out, a puzzle in which, at times, it is difficult to understand the meaning of certain events.
At the end of this enigmatic existential journey, there are many questions that arise, raising more doubts than answers in the protagonist’s mind. “Do ghosts really exist?” the boy hesitantly asks a policeman he meets by chance outside the tunnel. The man’s answer will come only after a long and ostentatious silence: “The ghost is you.” It is those who have remained anchored in the past, unable to continue a normal life, like a woman wandering the streets in search of her missing son, who represent the real ghosts of society.
The unbearable weight of manipulative ambiguity, unfounded guilt, and complicit silences. Maria Schrader’s new film, out of the competition at the 40th edition of the Torino Film Festival, is a protest against Harvey Weinstein that unleashes the desire to cry out that women have been deprived of for so long, and thereby redeems the right to their voice.
A young woman at the very start of her career, her soul bursting with dreams and her eyes full of naive hope, is overcome by a request as unexpected as it is inappropriate just when she was planning to attend a business meeting. “He ripped out my voice that day, just as I was starting to find it,” discloses Laura Madden, confessing her years-long belief that she was the only one who did not have the strength to stand up to the harassment from the powerful and feared Miramax producer. Laura was far from alone, but her persecutor was for a long time protected by a well-established system that systematically and scrupulously shielded the offenders. New York Times’ reporters Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan) and Jodi Kantor (Zoe Zakan) undertook an investigative enquiry to expose the harassment and sexual abuse committed by Weinstein, who had crossed not only professional boundaries, but also national borders, committing countless abuses overseas.
(from left) Jodi Kantor (Zoe Kazan), Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan), Dean Baquet (Andre Braugher), and Rebecca Corbett (Patricia Clarkson) in SHE SAID, directed by Maria Schrader.
The She Said crew is well aware that they are telling a true story and do not allow room for unnecessary violence, to which women are already abundantly exposed.
Weinstein’s towering physical presence is rendered by the oral testimonies of women who describe episodes in which he holds the unmistakable authority of the perpetrator. At the same time, his voice is emblematic, as we hear it in voice over, as violent and arrogant as the suffocating agreements he induced his victims to sign, ‘legally’ depriving them of their dignity. We retrace, guided by these testimonies, the spaces from which they would have so much wanted to escape, as in a nightmare from which they were not allowed to awaken. This film, however, also wants to be a safe space for all the women involved in order to express themselves and share their grief and anger. First and foremost, Megan and Jodi, that we follow far beyond the investigative processes and that Maria Schrader reveals to us with great sensitivity and respect. The cooperation and supervision of those directly involved and their permission to enter into each other’s private lives were undoubtedly essential to achieve the goal of producing a film that resonates strongly and encourages women to trust each other.
Having a proper compass on which one can rely can often prove to be a necessity in order not to lose one’s way too much; especially in a society which changes its skin year after year. Sometimes the right compass can be found close by, in one’s own backyard, in the apparent simplicity of a sentence spent by a person close to one’s heart; at other times, it is necessary to move away, especially if one’s loved ones, or at least those who once were, have emigrated, crossing borders, hoping for a better future. Daniele Vicari’s Compass for over ten years was Ettore Scola and Orlando, presented out of competition at the 40th Turin Film Festival, is dedicated to him.
TFF40’s Back to life section dedicated to film restoration proposed a diptych of particular interest on Italian polar, restoring two of its rare gems to their original splendour. Made at a distance of time and with different characteristics, the two films are united by the cold reception they received from critics and audiences at the time of their release and then rose to cult movie status.
Milano calibro 9 (1972) today represents not only the pinnacle of Fernando Di Leo’s career, but also the only Italian polar film of the period able to hold its own against the vaunted American and European crime films (between 1970 and 1972, masterpieces such as Friedkin’s The French Connection, Melville’s Le Cercle Rouge and Hodges’ Carter were released). And we would be talking about perfection if it were not for the Manichaeism of some scenes between the commissioner (Wolff) and his deputy (Pistilli) imbued with cheap socio-political rhetoric.
The restoration presented by the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia – Cineteca Nazionale has the great merit of restoring the overlays of the hours and days wanted by the director for the cyclical development of the plot (the title that was originally chosen was “Da lunedì a lunedì“) and of restoring the right visual and sound polish to the events of Rocco (Adorf), Nelly (Bouchet) and, above all, Ugo Piazza (a granitic Moschin), the victim, or diabolical architect, of a violent redde rationem in the organised underworld of Milan (this will become clear in the finale with a splendid triple act). The digital copy enhances the masterful direction aimed at dictating the tight rhythm (Di Leo himself, without modesty, stated “no one in Europe, apart from Melville, had the grit of an American cut that I had”) and the faithfulness of the screenplay to Scerbanenco’s anthology of hard-boiled tales from which it is based.
The picture of the acknowledged progenitor of the Italian-style detective film is completed by the neo-realist setting in which a gallery of extraordinary pulp characters act (Tarantino, by his own admission, will draw on this with full force), the pressing music by Bacalov and Osanna, and the creeping underlying determinism.
Nevertheless, one has to shift to Turin thirty years later for the other submerged and ‘cursed’ neo-noir.
Tre punto sei (2003), the debut and only feature film by the late Nicola Rondolino (son of the well-known film critic and historian Gianni), due to a series of production and distribution issues, it required a delicate recovery operation by Cinecittà, the National Cinema Museum of Turin and Augustus Color, who aimed at overcoming the obstacle of the absence of an original negative.
A versatile and much-loved figure in his hometown, who died prematurely in 2013, Rondolino immediately demonstrated an uncommon talent in his debut picture (but only few noticed it), bending genre clichés into a narrative that is not ordinary thanks to a contemporary style composed of dizzying ellipses, telluric action scenes and meaningful dramaturgical moments of clashes between the different characters. The vivid coherence of the multi-ethnic criminal imagery set in the Turin neighbourhood of San Salvario strikes a chord, avoiding the traps of the most retrograde racial prejudices, while the intense Binasco stands out in the role of the corrupt policeman madly in love with the woman contended by his best friend (a darker-than-ever Giallini), a disillusioned gangster in the service of a sui generis drug clan (an interesting experiment in quotations from The Sopranos).
The rediscovery of Tre punto sei is therefore a necessary step in the 40th anniversary of the festival that saw Rondolino as selector for a long time, regretting what he could have given to our cinema.
Two people are wandering in the depths of the wood; a bus drives into a tunnel whose exit cannot be seen; a thick blanket of smoke. These are just a few of the images that Stefan Costantinescu’s first feature film exploits. On one hand, the viewer can perceive the disorientation that Doru (Bogdan Dumitrache), a laborer who has emigrated to Sweden from Romania, feels upon his return. On the other, we witness his wife Nicoleta (Ofelia Popii), his teenage daughter, and his arteriosclerotic mother’s way of “welcoming” him “back” with no more than surprise and coldness; the only one to feel any genuine emotion seems to be his faithful dog Amza. Behind Doru’s unexpected return there is actually more to than the work-related reason he keeps peddling to anyone who asks: while in Sweden, Doru received anonymous messages informing him of his wife’s alleged marital infidelity. Therefore, the true purpose of his return to Romania is to verify their authenticity.
Like many of his compatriots (Cristian Mungiu, Cristi Puiu), Costantinescu is able to create glacial and frozen atmospheres, where tensions swirl without erupting, if not at their very limit. This justifies the cold and aseptic tones of the cinematography, and the indoor shots with the clear aim of “imprisoning” the protagonists. Moreover, those scenes are built with sequence-plans in order to allow the viewer to pick every single word of what the characters say to each other. The risk of epigonism is avoided because the camera, like Doru, also breaks free from staticity and begins to peddle the characters generating a great deal of suspense, in full Hitchcockian style. While witnessing this “stalking” process, we end up putting together the pieces of the image of a country where patriarchal culture still takes hold, where the woman is not even allowed to go have a coffee without her husband’s approval, while the latter’s affairs and escapades are all but forbidden.
Through a withdrawn performance, Dumitrache is remarkably effective in capturing the grotesque dimension of the broken man. Sometimes he also manages to evoke laughter in the viewer – even in the context of domestic violence in which the film is set. Nevertheless, his partner Popii also shines with a great performance of glacial irony. However, any intended or unintended trace of humor disappears in the powerful finale: it dodges the mere consolation aim and seems to suggest that even in a society where everyone is cold, violent, distant (with or without COVID-19), mean, and obsessed with IKEA, one can always find something to hold on to. It is a struggle, but it can be done; even if you are a little bit of a man, and a little bit of a beast.
“After spending a few weeks with the watchmakers, my views on socialism were resolved: I was an anarchist.” With this sentence by Pyotr Kropotkin extracted from his Memoirs of a Revolutionary (1877), director Cyril Schäublin decided to start his second feature film ‘Unrest’ in which, by reconstructing the events of 1870, he recounts how the independence of thought of the artisans in the Jura Mountains ignited the spark for the birth of the international anarchist movement.
When approaching the work of Albert Serra, we cannot help but notice the great contradiction at the heart of his cinema: that between the setting of his images, which nestle in the past of the European history (from the 1980s of his debut film to the 1700s French – his favourite historical period – of La mort de Louis XIV and Liberté) and the sense of atrophy, of an absolute and out-of-time present that apocalyptically pervades his characters, always waiting for a climax that will never come, or that perhaps has already arrived.
A spasmodic wait for the end that becomes nuclear paranoia for a Benoît Magimel called to play the ambiguous protagonist of Pacifiction, a diplomatic commissioner who has arrived in the former French colony of Tahiti to try to investigate unsettling rumours of an imminent resumption of dangerous atomic tests. Serra works on the extreme stylisation and opacity of the characters and on the exhibited artificiality of lights – as was already the case in the unforgettable finale of Liberté – to create a highly suggestive visual texture, a floating and uncertain space in which it is possible to perceive the abstraction of power in all its ruthless and pervasive senselessness. It is between half-voices and hints that the protagonist De Roller – designated intermediary between the politicians and the population – probes the island moving as if in a limbo – a somnambulist wandering in what seems to be an only-apparent state of life. The viewer is restrained in the hypnotic movement of the film, which concedes few clues and casts wide, unresolved grey areas, constantly moving to an unknowable off-screen that weights like an omen.
To duplicate and amplify the feeling of threat that travels under the skin, there is the eerie presence of the ocean, which with its surface engulfs and conceals. De Roller is driven by a desire for clarity that will never become tangible reality. In the most important dialogue-monologue of the film, the protagonist talks about a world that has lost the conception of time and memory, of a humanity that must have as its primary need that to illuminate, to see the withered skins of power that have already been embodied by the exposed and dying body of Jean-Pierre Léaud in La mort de Louis XIV. With Pacifiction, Serra continues his work on the perception of the present and the invisible decomposition of a frozen and motionless time, aiming his gaze for the first time at contemporaneity.
When Mateo (Manel Llunell) is diagnosed with brain cancer, his mother Libertad (Ángela Molina) gets the chance she was looking for: Mateo is now harmless, in need of care and attention that only she can give him. Eduardo Casanova proposes an Oedipal love story with his second full-length-film “La piedad”, presented in competition at the 40th edition of Torino Film Festival.
Mateo never leaves home without his mother, they sleep together in the same bed, and whenever one of them gets sick, both of them experience symptoms. Their personalities are blended to the point that they sometimes get swapped or one merges with the other; they laugh, cry, and suffer together. Mateo was born to satisfy his mother’s need to be essential for someone. What scares Libertad is the prospect that one day her son will grow up and be independent, take a bath on his own, and leave home. She wants him to stay in their little bubble in which she breastfeeds him and nurtures him forever, even though he is a grown man. The relationship between mother and son is compared with the parallel story set in North Korea, where dictator and subject cannot live without each other. Firstly, Mateo’s absent father plays the tyrant’s role, as he appears in Mateo’s dreams in the place of di Kim Jong-un while killing a unicorn, but the son will soon realize that the real cause of his discomfort his is mother.
As it is true with his first work, Skins (2017), Casanova is not scared of showing images that bring cinema back to pure visual art, building a voyeuristic relationship among the viewers that ask themselves whether they want to keep looking at the screen or not. The colour pink dominates the scene, exposing and dissecting the characters’ unspeakable secrets. They lose their humanity and become torn, sick pieces of flesh. The director is much interested in psychic anomalies rather than physical ones. Therefore, Casanova investigates the result of the combination of two psychic disorders: firstly, the Münchausen syndrome by proxy is the syndrome which leads Libertad to keep her son in a sickly stage by secretly drugging him, and secondly, the Stockholm syndrome that leads Mateo back to his tormentor, his mother. The son’s Oedipus complex, which makes him hate his father (whom he replaces) without even knowing him, contributes to the couple’s toxicity. Moreover, even though his mother is the cause of all his misfortunes, Mateo cannot survive without her, since he does not conceive anything except the morbid love that has accompanied him from birth.
The Plains, David Easteal’s first feature film, is the Australian filmmaker’s experimental attempt to faithfully reconstruct his time spent in the car of Andrew Rakowski, a lawyer in his 50s returning home at the end of his workday in Melbourne’s outer suburbs. A work that eludes definition, a radical, yet malleable cinema verité.
The oyster that remains attached to the rock on which it was birthed by fate will live peacefully. The oyster that instead ventures into the unknown in search of fortune can only end up swallowed by the ocean. This is the so-called “Ideal of the Oyster”, which is essential in the events of “I Malavoglia” by Giovanni Verga and of “La Lunga Corsa”, the second movie by director Andrea Magnani and the only Italian feature film in competition at the fortieth edition of the Turin Film Festival.
Giacinto (Adriano Tardiolo) was born and raised in prison, the only environment he recognizes as home during his training process. Abandoned by his parents, he is looked after by prison guard Jack (Giovanni Calcagno), who becomes his figure of reference. However, Jack would like Giacinto to go out and make a living away from the bars and narrow corridors through which the boy enjoys running despite it being forbidden. Thus, he takes him to a family house which, however, is more of a prison for the child than the prison itself. As soon as he gets the chance, he runs away and attacks a man to get arrested and be able to go “home”, but he discovers that children cannot go to prison. So, he tries again on his eighteenth birthday. Jack understands that Giacinto will never change his mind and has him hired as a guard in the penitentiary, which thus becomes a place of work, lodging and recreation for him.
If “Easy – Un viaggio facile facile” (2017), Magnani’s first work, was a classic road movie, here instead a static journey is presented: Giacinto runs for hours but never moves, he remains inside his miniature “Matrix”, preferring the blue pill to the red one (colors that, among other things, are recurrent in the film). He wants to stay locked up in his cave because he sees nothing interesting in the frenetic stillness that pervades the exterior, where people seem to do nothing but run aimlessly between circling buses and construction sites that have been standing still for years.
Jack tries to get Giacinto to escape from what he sees as a mental cage without realizing that he himself is the first of the prisoners chained to a life that doesn’t satisfy him and from which he tries to escape by drinking in the evening. Giacinto doesn’t run to escape or to win a race; he runs to run, unlike those like Jack who would like to flee, but stand still in their perpetual unhappiness.
Thanks to the Covid-19 emergency a lifer finds himself in a situation of greater freedom when compared to that experienced by many others. In Il corpo dei giorni much more is revealed, thanks to this paradox. Santabelva collective meets the lifer Mario Tuti, one of the protagonists of the neo-fascist terrorism in the 1970s, in an unexpected situation. Interesting starting points arise from this confrontation, both historically and cinematically.
