Locarno 2018 Review: Trot

This icy film indulges in banal images and obvious metaphor. Conflict and imprisonment appear everywhere. Dinner tables offer impromptu inquisitions; car backseats provide erotic solace. All stare at one another. The brooding is bleak and ridiculous. We’re supposed to feel the frictions of civility and barbarism, of ancient and new. Instead, we’re denied the comic absurdity of tragedy, the fine movements of despair. Beastly, bad, cold: these states weave together to enforce a virile, inhibiting status quo.

Carme (María Vázquez) suffers grand oppression in the Galician mountains, desiring escape. Her mother is in the last throes of life; her father (Celso Bugallo) barely says a word. It’s an unambiguously grim existence, one thwarted at every breath. Boredom in a bakery over a hotel or bar job. Symptoms of clinical depression spinning silently inward. Framed by arid naturalism, Carme’s life is one of foreclosure, of constant interrogation. The gap thins between peaks and existence, between hard surfaces and consciousness, between material and symbol.

Her macho brother Luís (Diego Anido), brow furrowed, returns with his wife María (Tamara Canosa) for the local “Rapa das Bestas.” Round up the roaming wild horses and defile their liberty, this the apparently timeless battle played out between animal and man. Sovereign reveals himself by taming the beast of the exterior and, inevitably, the interior. Won’t be long before he ogles his exhausted sister and imparts belated career advice. The tacit culture of distance is superseded by violent, unforgiving immediacy. Carme is thrust into the dirt, into wage labour, into efforts to speak loudly, clearly.

Director Xacio Baño has produced a moody, sullen work that excites itself through equine imagery. We’re invited to focus on the barrel of the stallion, to see within its heaving stomach, between its protruding ribs. Look closely and glimpse allegory. Atavistic rejuvenation is sought in the whirring crowd of horses and men. With headlock imposed and mane cut, dominion is reasserted. The phallus celebrates, stimulated until next year. Swinging cocks have fought valiantly, ferociously, pointlessly. Carme gazes on, barely emancipated.

★★

Joseph Owen

Locarno 2018 Review: Blaze

Ethan Hawke offers the conventional tale of decline and fall through a freeform directorial approach: the story of country singer Blaze Foley is segmented, scattered, intercut. Clipped sequences, tangential folklore and aphoristic patter shape the portrait of a marginal artist. Talent and vice are asserted, musicianship and depravity assumed. Snippet and suggestion constitute a shivered mosaic, one of innate potential chipped at through burnout, destruction and decay.

Ben Dickey impressively captures Blaze’s mumbling Texan diction, his expressive if limited songwriting, his ursine alcoholism. Alia Shawkat resonates affection, frustration and worldliness as his wife Sybil Rosen, on whose memoir the screenplay is based. Her hardships are manifold and persuasive. Their feasible attraction is romantic, earnestly pursued, doomed to recrimination, bound up in a Walden-esque cabin. The music business, enmeshed with obscene urban demands, gives few others to root for.

Former bandmates Zee (Josh Hamilton) and Townes Van Sandt (Charlie Sexton) entertain in the radio booth, augmenting and distorting the posthumous legacy. These scenes comprise subtle disruption, a wry framing device undercutting the promise of hagiography. They offset a mostly sympathetic, wholesome and consolatory narrative. Performances are dialled in. Hawke has his friends form a record label trio tying down Blaze to contract and obligation. Their caustic interventions are showy and underwritten, puncturing the general swollen misadventure.

Blaze’s apparent influence on Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson is ill-defined. Was he that good? His music appears neither original nor transcendent. It’s competent. Alternating between taciturn humility and determined self-immolation, Dickey’s Blaze is deep brow, brooding complication and twee spirituality. The flame burns quick and bright, the sulphuric trajectory dissatisfies. Euphony buckles under oppressive melancholia, under a mournful drive to expire, to be extinguished.

The well-worn route of drugs and excess is depicted in pierced, fragmented chronology. Rockstar descent is processed through breathy diversions and staggered regression. This baggy, dissonant film splinters a hokey world of plaid shirts, wax jackets and sincere moralism. Sentimentality is kept at one remove, the happy ending forfeited. Arrhythmic resolution comes drenched in a sickly auburn filter, saturating a life played out tirelessly, an arpeggio spanning octaves.

★★★

Joseph Owen

Locarno 2018 Review: All Good

Stoicism leads into repression, into guilt, into despair. This thesis forms the basis of All Good, a relentless, focused work that presents a single trauma squashed down—far down—into the protagonist’s psyche. Dormant grief wrestles against imminent eruption. The aftermath of abuse produces coagulation: private repercussions fester in a rancid pus; systemic obligations prevent repair. It’s culture, patriarchy, endemic misogyny, adorned with the apologetic veneer of good taste, financial targets and facile regret.

White-collar professional Janne (Aenne Schwarz) is raped after a school reunion. Her assailant Martin (Hans Löw) is lanky, bespectacled middle-management, pleasant until the point, charming prior to duress. That they spent the night drinking together gives him enough encouragement. She resists, then acquiesces. The event is unadorned, daring to seem unexceptional. Her internalisation process has begun, the emotional panopticon instated, the prison perimeter guarded.

Every aggression that follows feels clinically coordinated. Awful coincidences multiply. Serendipity is inverted. Janne’s boyfriend Piet (Andreas Döhler) is hot-headed and self-absorbed, offering imperceptible solace. The new editor boss (Tilo Nest) is generally sympathetic, wound up in his own denial. Janne gives clear, actionable advice for their respective woes, projecting a desire for help. She stays mute on her assault, this dissonance not one of perversion but of grim resignation.

Director Eva Trobisch conducts an oppressive psychological test of silent agony, a plausible drama that embraces naturalistic sequences without fussy commitment to realism. The pernicious refrain, “all good,” echoes and re-echoes, a cruelly neat and heightened motif. Accumulated horrors show male ignorance and uselessness: pleas to talk go unheard; responses fall below inadequacy. Scenes fix on Janne’s growing exasperation, her quivering decency, her bargaining with neglect.

Where’s the breaking point? Often in transit, often under duty, often dictated by amoral fate. The apparently mundane worry will tip the scales, dismembering parts, revealing the unforgiving crime underneath. Of course, her misdemeanour is barked aloud, her petty castigation made public. Janne bites her lip, composes herself, speaks clearly, refuses to get off. To speak or die, to tell or not: here, it’s a false choice.

★★★★

Joseph Owen

Locarno 2018 Review: Glaubenberg

Incest is transgressive, traumatic, basically exciting, and ripe for cinematic treatment. Forbidden romance! Sibling lust! But the allure drains away if love is unrequited. You need only read Keats. In Glaubenberg a sister’s imagination and need suffuses all else: her delirium displaces cold reality. These cravings are bound to geography. In confined spaces, debauched eroticism boils and spits; across Eurasian plains, it’s reduced to a weary simmer.

Lena (Zsofia Körös) wants her brother Noah (Francis Meier). Tragic desire enters stage left. He’s cautious of her advances, so escapes. She pursues him through surveillance, dreams and plane tickets to Turkey. This is a teenage crush wrought impossible. Jealousy and envy—to protect and consume—blur truth with delusion. Uncertain ardour is rarely curious. Of course we end up in Aphrodisias.

Director Thomas Imbach batters a good premise into tedious submission. Hallucinations barely register Lena’s internal dispute, her impulses of the id. Bland expressions undercut supposedly fraught emotion. The once frantic search grows listless and repetitive, the brother-sister relationship banal past its sexual intrigue. This is yearning: it dries up, devitalises. Genetic attraction devours its young, here rendered boring enough to never feel ethically troubling.

One moment of consequence works well. Lena starts seeing Noah’s friend Enis (Nikola Šošic), encouraging him into the vacant upstairs. She stipulates he wear a particular T-shirt. Glances punctuate the amorous grapple, these directed to the wall where a photo sticks: Noah topless, grinning. The subsequent family dinner—all are invited—plays out joyously. Parents watch on, disbelieving and mistaken towards revelations voiced, then muted.

Equal affection isn’t likely. A mental fugue asserts itself. Fury and frustration seek a mystical denouement. Of the pair, who suffers more? A gushing amalgam of rocks and tears points to the stranded Noah, feeling the sharp end of Auden’s rueful acknowledgement, to let the more loving one be he. All the while, Lena—exhausted, defeated—disappears into stone. It’s oppressively poetic. Softly she goes now, pad pad.

★★

Joseph Owen

Locarno 2018 Review: A Land Imagined

Rejuvenated through economic miracle, Singapore’s success is one of intangible demarcation: it keeps making itself bigger. Neighbouring countries export sand and labour. Sovereignty is blurred, producing a disorientation of migrants and natives. The extension of the physical border and the fuel of virtual life create an uncertain imaginary. Identity falters, mystery supersedes clarity, madness reigns. What if you are lost within?

Yeo Siew Hua’s knotty, perplexing film grasps and discards this central question, resulting in a deliberately sly, hallucinatory work. By combining genre—thriller, realist drama and potently, neo-noir—he takes us deep into murky delusion, corporate conspiracy and worker exploitation. The essential thread is aloneness in a hyper-technological world, a state intoxicating and nightmarish. It’s a lot, really.

Policeman Lok (Peter Yu) is assigned to investigate a missing persons case. Wang (Liu Xiaoyi), a Chinese construction worker, frequents an online gaming attic. Mindy (Luna Kwok), exoticised and capricious, tempts him from the screen. Ajit (Ishtiaque Zico), Wang’s emblem of pure companionship, falls into a sinister, cold-eyed, exceptional abyss. Everyone speaks as if human after the fact. The abyss looks back.

Lok and Kwan tail one another, pursuing a hopeless truth. Mindy acts as beguiling intermediary, a figure extracted from technology, wistful and translucent. Ajit is the point of empathy, cruelly smothered. Despite the mobility innate to their jobs, characters are frustrated, fixed. Technology alienates, swamps, and deforms the self. Scenery dissolves around a cast of imitated bodies. Mimesis is a cruel joke, repeated over.

A Land Imagined is a formal failure. The end elicits an extended shrug, a sideways glance, a benign grimace. Motivations are lost in a haze of stilted conversation. Motive and jeopardy console themselves in abstract visions, in computer delirium, in sick-making first-person shooters. Selected scenes mostly fascinate: thematically complex, inquisitive, ambitious, yielding a dissatisfying whole. Fragments of reality offer concentrated pleasures, these contained to a booth, hooked up to a monitor.

★★★

Joseph Owen

A Land Imagined won the Golden Leopard at Locarno Film Festival.

Locarno 2018 Review: With the Wind [Le vent tourne]

Radical ecology, self-sufficiency, the toils of the land. All offer narrative possibilities: a well-meaning ode to collective endeavour, a rustic tale of primitive living, a call to save the planet. Director Bettina Oberli subverts these expectations, showing the pain of a passion project, the frustrations of a bucolic landscape. In a world of Edenic bliss, ruptures court the surface.

Melanie Thierry and Pierre Deladonchamps play Pauline and Alex, a couple tending to an isolated farm in the Jura mountains. They grimace against weather and strife, before deciding to install their own energy source. A stranger named Samuel (Nuno Lopes) delivers the wind turbine, bringing equipment, fresh sexual agency and—for what is a finely honed, high-minded life—shocking pragmatism.

Much tends to tone-deaf melodrama, unfortunately paired with earnest explorations of environmental woe. Deladonchamps has an unforgiving role as idealistic taskmaster, while Thierry is handed an oddly subdued scene with a just-born calf. It fares miserably and anti-climactically. The erotic state of exception consists of an ethereal hotel room, cloudlike and ludicrous. Eternal optimism is shown to be boring and risible, solitude an austere indulgence.

It’s always going to the wall. Darkness and rain augur doom. We anticipate agricultural breakdown, for vicious modernity to triumph over noble ambitions, these still fed through folly and self-interest. As intervention into the perils of egoism, consumption and pollution, the film buckles under harness. Perfunctory dialogue aches to be heard. The love triangle has soft edges. Sustainability receives cursory interrogation; emotional investment is oversold and underwritten.

As Pauline and Alex’s romantic love deteriorates, the animals remain the point of unity. Yet their atmosphere is one of helplessness, of minor successes overwhelmed by heart-wrenching defeat. Vices of the city persist, agents of ultimate failure, poisoning the pastoral and prefacing a pessimistic end. These mix with the pristine countryside, producing a deathly ammoniac smell, bleak and pungent. Nature and evil are intimately bound, but how, and why?

★

Joseph Owen

Locarno 2018 Review: Alice T.

Radu Muntean’s Alice T. distills discomfort. Teenage pregnancy is brutally and unsentimentally depicted, fed through fictions and lies, these rarely mendacious but always confused. Thematic purchase comes from a questionable, warped view of childhood identity, one predicated on adoption as impulse for existential uncertainty. Without biological parents, Alice feels she doesn’t belong. This isn’t a persuasive thesis in itself.

Andra Guti is impressive as Alice. We devote much attention to her crimson, curly hair: an aesthetic focus, indicating rebellion. She’s rude, capricious and self-absorbed. She’s flirtatious and frightened. She’s 16. Family disputes play out regularly. Her mother Bogdana (Mihaela Sîrbu) gives full emotional range: contempt to fury, despair to affection. These feelings apparently amount to unconditional love. At poorer moments, they amount to abuse.

Under the array of unsympathetic figures, with and without authority, Alice’s behaviour fluctuates. She variously charms, shows vulnerability, retreats into moodiness and practises resistance until suffering a grim, partial epiphany. The relentless focus on pure upset leaves a vacuum. It arrives instead of acute emotional study, of forming a complex mood and tone. If this is another example of the Romanian New Wave, it sets a different precedent.

Static, extended shots—in corridors, in hospital rooms—resist intrigue. It’s hard to locate profundity in officious, sterile environments. School becomes a training ground for malice; cuddled cushions become macabre premonitions of miscarriage. Fear and dismissal stalk the playground. Anger and violence beget one another. Muntean hints at sociopathic tendencies, duly unexplored. A scene at a friend’s house, featuring an obtuse father who refuses to leave, impresses indelible horror.

Alice is looked after and admonished, thwarted by equivocations and delays. Our voyeuristic looming does little for our understanding, nor enlighten her perplexed condition. She refuses to be spoken for and remains a brat—or more accurately, a wayward teenager undergoing immense strain—until the moment of overwhelming trauma. This provokes a moral and intellectual challenge, one that leaves us exhausted and bereft.

★★★

Joseph Owen

Locarno 2018 Review: Long Way Home [Temporada]

Not heinous, this film is rather slight, subtle and—perhaps the most faintly damning of terms—gentle. Not without wit, director André Novais Oliveira keeps the journey at a plod as we follow Juliana (Grace Passô) to the Brazilian town of Contagem, an expansive metropolis relative to her inner city roots. Beneath the move exists tragedy, a sheet silently thawing, cracks promising a life removed from the past.

Juliana waits for her obtuse, absent husband. She frets in the state of delay, gazing at anticipatory symbols, interrogating her impotent mobile phone. Communication withers. She starts a job for the local authority, inspecting homes for dengue fever. Mosquitoes, famously ephemeral and deadly, carry the opportunity of a basic wage. Colleagues joke of how they’ll soon find something new, as if decades don’t stretch outwards.

Juliana develops a social life. Half bemused, she plays Street Fighter with a garrulous friend, enticed into silence of the early afternoon. Later, as she opens up, trauma is voiced but partly articulated. In a slow, acute scene, we—voyeurs of suffering—watch from the doorway. Recollection halts at pain: memory flags and agony embeds itself. That hurt more than anything, she says, before or since. Loss travels on the bus routes.

Oliveira smartly, solemnly evokes the body, depicting large, naked figures with candour. One sex act recalls Lucien Freud’s erotic portraits, all flesh and limbs merged into a single liquid mass. Fumbling positions and untapped lust are rendered through sensuous facture. Amalgamated by brushstroke, frame and form jostle under sleeping bags, burying themselves into evenings of implacable, disquieting peace.

This is about transience, about temporary measures that shift to permanence. Expectation is doused in reality, in necessary labour, poorly paid. This speaks to several paradoxes: liberty through precariousness, security through stasis. One is a free market hymn, the other a conservative myth. Juliana’s independence and autonomy blossom, these tempered by a peculiar dissatisfaction, the essential melancholy of moving on.

★★★

Joseph Owen

Locarno 2018 Review: Genesis [Genèse]

This is a stunning diptych of adolescent love, often unrequited. Philippe Lesage has rendered a timeworn tale in extraordinary fashion. What should be twee, stale and predictable is wrought new, as an exhilarating shift inverts the interwoven trauma of the central romances. We finish with longing that’s innocent yet still pained, with testament to budding youth and its quieter heartbreak.

Noée Abita and Théodore Pellerin excel as Charlotte and Guillaume, ambiguously wealthy stepsiblings living in the French-speaking Canadian suburbs. Guillaume is precocious and erudite, Charlotte compassionate and confused. Ground down, the pair suffer from variously indifferent, oleaginous and vicious male attention—a nod to universal truth, to the promise of relationships that fall into cruelty. Beauty is remarked upon, sullied, thrown away. To tamper pristine desire is unforgivable, almost dismissive.

Lesage’s heavily autobiographical study values emotional naivety and visual kinesis. The boarding school is a hotbed of juvenile patter infused with high academic learning. Intellectual snobbery outdoes emotional competence. Teacher and student alike demean the sporty types, the goading jesters, the incipient signs of queer difference. In an exceptional space, all are little boys, all wear armour over anguish. With lens trained on his fluctuating expression, Guillaume, once clown prince of the classroom, befalls a tragic fate.

After an awkward sexual encounter, Guillaume volunteers to address the class. Feeling pours out. He articulates an emerging sensibility far beyond most teenage Salinger readers, beyond the catalogue of Smiths’ lyricisms. All bar the subject stand to applaud. The melancholy prediction wedded to his words seems unfounded but proves prescient. Linked in turmoil, he and Charlotte descend to their last ends, giving way—outrageously, unexpectedly—to Felix (Édouard Tremblay-Grenier), a young boy in summer camp meeting his first love.

Genèse is formally and morally askew. The asymmetric narrative works as counterpoint, a musical motif without antithesis. Laddish chants and eighties synths are elegant refrains, not loci of dissonance. A campfire sing-a-long brings into slight relief the harrowing events, but Guillaume and Charlotte’s brutal, clipped denouements fail to reconcile the abuses endured. More resolution feels right in a knowingly theatrical landscape. Instead, the return to childhood is a haunting false memory, in the same world but from a different life.

★★★★★

Joseph Owen

Locarno 2018 Review: Immersed Family [Familia sumergida]

Woozy, beguiling, tactile, this is a sumptuous film from María Alché. Comparisons with Lucrecia Martel’s Zama are cheap, perhaps, but Familia sumergida similarly evokes the dislocation after loss, the phantasmagoria wrought by grief, the permanent state of anticipation. Dreams and hallucinations wrestle with memory: in a collision of saturated images, it’s impossible to discern between them.

Marcela (Mercedes Morán) grieves for her sister. Her world shifts imperceptibly, then drastically. Her house is not hers. Her ursine husband (Marcelo Subiotto) is unfamiliar. Her children seem out of joint. Through her daughter’s friend Nacho (Diego Velazquez) she finds a disquieting outlet. A strange child, he encourages her into a different realm, into a cracked, unsettling dialogue with deceased and ulterior relatives. They cackle, admonish, hold court.

This work consumes its subjects. Performance and pretence drives Marcela, a born actor and mimic, a silhouette shifting into novel forms. Voices go out of pitch; masks become commonplace; music promotes unease. No one seems right, nor are they disembodied. Clearing a home becomes a process in which materials take on greater solidity and meaningful substance. Curtains are caressed.

One family postmortem stands apart: brother and sister debate on the nature of their parents’ relationship. Were they happy? Was she happy? Do we simply have good and bad days? It pierces a potent miasma brewing in the lounge. Through the smog, the debate is hotly contested and punishingly lucid.

Intelligence is inaudible. Understanding is stripped away. Figures are reduced, emboldened. Haze induces an irresistible narcolepsy. Exquisitely natural performances deceive in such an absurd creation. We view so much through slanted openings, through misted windows. The mystery doesn’t irritate, but is made tangible and acceptable. It must be the curtains—not just in their pattern but in their movement.

★★★★

Joseph Owen