Home » At the Locarno film festival two films come out of every format – Francesco Boille

At the Locarno film festival two films come out of every format – Francesco Boille

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At the Locarno film festival two films come out of every format – Francesco Boille

August 11, 2022 4:12 pm

The international competition of this 75th edition of the Locarno film festival offered a good number of significant titles and at least two “UFOs”, that is, two unidentified flying objects, two films outside any format of auteur cinema.

The first is by the Russian maestro Alexander Sokurov, a director deeply fond of the festival as evidenced by the delightful autobiographical short film he made for the Postcards from the future series, conceived specifically for Locarno and screened every evening in Piazza Grande. He enchanted not only for his great humanity, but also with his new short but dazzling feature film.

A self-referential power
The film in question is Fairytale, which in just seventy-eight minutes takes us to an “other” dimension: a limbo-waiting room for heaven or the underworld in which Josif Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill walk, with brief appearances of Napoleon and of a rather disconsolate Jesus Christ. Against the background of these digital animations, made of repertoire materials of extraordinary quality, strange scenographies flow, foggy backdrops where figurations à la Piranesi predominate, prison visions of a world that was (great).

Often whispered, these voices are the echoes of the dangerous and sick egomaniacs we see on screen. But here they are alone, prey to their selves: a world of perennially self-referential ectoplasms and which therefore lose themselves in the self-referentiality to which (they) are condemned alone. This already seems like a punishment, hell. Also because the Stalins, the Mussolins and others are many and multifaceted. Each with their own look, they give each other a hand. And yet they are laughable, if they had not produced so much suffering. Suffering of which there are, even here, wide visual echoes. But between the lines the author seems to evoke how this was, and still is, a sort of sadomasochistic relationship between peoples and their idol-executioners.



So, after the films about Hitler, Lenin and the Japanese emperor Hirohito, this is yet another work that the director dedicates to the idiot madness of great power, especially that of the first half of the twentieth century. Here the protagonists are reduced to a kind of more or less faint radio broadcasts, increasingly feeble, coming from another dimension. The fragments of their speeches and statements thus appear in their emptiness, although the director manages to make poetic material out of them. It is impossible to say whether we are in a film-dream or a film-nightmare: the poetic seduction and anguish that the presence of these figures arouses are feelings that chase each other from beginning to end. And they make manifest the endemic schizophrenia, or at least the duality, of the protagonists. As in the case of Churchill: only one of the many Winstons we see will be admitted to heaven. This purgatory-limbo is an almost trashy world, and only the refinement and the high and ethical questioning of the author prevents it from really being so.

Courageous and unconventional as always, Sokurov seems maliciously to speak of the past to refer to the present, including that of his home, Russia. But he also talks about art and cinema itself, linking up with his other important feature films such as Russian Ark (on the Hermitage in St. Petersburg), Faust, Francophonia (on the Louvre during the Nazi occupation). After all, cinema is made up of ectoplasms projected in the dark on a large screen that vanish with the light, like those demons-ectoplasms of human history that we see here. They walk endlessly and without peace, ready to dissolve into the nothingness of the divine whiteness.

In the deep northeast
On the contrary, the second “UFO” film of this edition, and not only of the Competition, is Gigi reads it by Alessandro Comodin, also quite short (ninety minutes) and which is presented in a subdued, modest way. But this third feature by the Friulian director was acclaimed by the French newspaper Libération as one of the most original and interesting titles offered this year by Locarno. Apparently less set on the poetic, the exotic-archaic and the abstraction than the previous works of the filmmaker, due to a very concrete form, fun and pleasing to the vision, the film reveals a body-actor extracted from the more prosaic reality and yet vector of a form of surrealism. But it is only appearance.

We are in the Italian north-east, more closed in on itself – always in the parts where another Comodin film was set, Giacomo’s summer (2011) – but in the height of summer, with the explosion of light and colors of nature. “Gigi” in the title is a local police warden – played by Pier Luigi Mecchia, who is also vigilant in life – the son of the Northern League’s paranoia and obsessiveness, the product of a mentality based on “safety” and forged on fear. But at the same time he is the antithesis of all this: Gigi is out of the norm compared to his colleagues, he is well-intentioned towards his community, exuberant with humanity and communicativeness. And he takes everything philosophically.



He is a country policeman who does not practice his profession in a rural setting, in a village with archaic constructions, but in a succession of small houses and villas in the green of nature. He experiences an aseptic monotony, broken and humanized only by his overflowing good humor and his humor, with which he confronts a boss who is always looking for an excuse to oppress him. We learn all this gradually, through the communications of the internal radio of his service car. Much of the film, in fact, is set in Gigi’s car and in the places where the car takes him. The protagonists, in fact, are Gigi, a voiceover and occasionally some colleague, often a woman. Just as Gigi’s neighbor is off camera, who has so much to say about his uncultivated, luxuriant, almost exotic garden with which the film opens. It is a surreal dialogue that looks like a dazed monologue, despite the back and forth. On the surface, it almost seems as if a mad ventriloquist is speaking.

And there is an ambivalence, albeit minimal, in Gigi. Talking about him can perhaps be annoyingly honeyed at times, more often persuasive, captivating and above all musical. Thus, in this world to be guarded but where in reality nothing happens, in which one is called for an alleged fire of weeds and absolutely nothing is found, it is precisely the empty endless circularity, this limbo-purgatory wrapped in greenery, this Eternal Groundhog Day – but without Bill Murray’s party community in I start all over again – to create the drama: the frequent suicides under the trains on which Gigi begins to investigate, driven by perplexity towards a strange character who wanders around. Real perception or yet another, little paranoia that infects even the protagonist?

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What is certain is that alienation produces monsters. Small monsters, but with heavy consequences – and here we are at the highest level of the off-screen – on a political, local and national level. As in a reinterpretation of Buzzati’s Tartar desert, where the enemy never arrives. But here the register is minimal, bordering on the theater of the absurd and nevertheless captured by the very material of reality. Alienation becomes abstraction, a feeling of estrangement heralding fantasy and interiority. Out of any format just like its protagonist, Gigi reads it it is a theoretical film without exhibiting it, imbued with a naturalness and a truly human simplicity, even if on closer inspection we are in that simplicity that hides a refined complexity and real depth.

Alessandro Comodin is one of the exponents of the new generation of Italian filmmakers contiguous to the poetry documentary or to the (video) installations – that of Michelangelo Frammartino, Pietro Marcello, Alice Rohrwacher – which looks to the archaic and to a sort of fairy tale to tell modernity, but with the ability to also be direct and therefore ready to broaden their audience. Here he has achieved a small miracle: a unique arthouse film on an international level, which lends itself not only to the realization of a sequel, but also to that of a television miniseries. We make an appeal to find an Italian distribution quickly: Gigi is a cop who punches the screen and makes friends with the viewer.

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