05 August 2022 14:30
The 75th edition of the Locarno film festival opens in Piazza Grande with a real cinematic firework. One might fear that a will-o’-the-wisp will gradually reveal itself over the course of the little more than two hours, despite the undoubted skill of staging. And instead we believe it will remain in the annals of cinema Bullet trainthe action / thriller film by David Leitch – to be released in Italian cinemas on 25 August – which among the many and varied interpreters has its pivot in Brad Pitt.
We wrote “staging” precisely because this film is based on staging, intended both as an imposture and as a representation, and this by all the characters, including the killer played by Brad Pitt, who is also one of the nicest. But it is no less a staging film intended as a direction, indeed above all of directionalthough the excellent script is based on a novel by Kotaro Isaka.
Set from start to finish on the “fastest train in the world” and almost never outside it for a long time except for a few flashbacks, it is difficult to understand where we are – even if it is evident that it is Japan – if not in a sort of globalization of the imaginary that travels at such a speed as to lead to a form of abstraction. For the viewer, the resulting alienation effect is strong. Because Bullet train it is a flag of the hybridization of opposing cinematographic styles and geographies.
The action sequences of the first half hour constitute a sort of psychedelic overdose of the Japanese pop aesthetic, already very charged in itself; moreover, each car has its climax, a bit like video installations. The killers, the clan leaders, the armed people, are both black and white, both Western and Japanese. In the large cast of the film that David Leitch also co-produced, there are emerging actors of the new American cinema such as Aaron Taylor-Johnson (guest in Locarno), big names of Hollywood of the nineties such as Sandra Bullock, or even famous interpreters of Japanese cinema which, however, have already made their appearance in numerous US productions, such as Hiroyuki Sanada, martial arts master.
But it is also hybrid because it goes from action to dramatic, from thriller to comic – often in a cartoon version – from kung-fu film to manga – often insane – in a skilful alchemy of the balances and dosages of the various narrative registers. In reality it seems to be in one of those crazy (but very successful) films of Far Eastern genre cinema – Hong Kong or Korean, Thai or Japanese – that in the last twenty-five years the Italian public has been able to discover on the big screen thanks at the Far East Film Festival in Udine and no longer only on the various technological supports (TV, DVD, etc.). A genre cinema aimed at the general public but often crazy, surreal and which tends to push everything to paroxysm, kitsch included. Like here. Except that the filmmaker and production are American like most of the actors and actresses.
One cannot but be critical of a certain cinema that has been working on glossy advertising for years and empties the image of interiority and depth, whose paradigm are the talented Scott brothers – talented above all Ridley (Alien, Blade runner) rather than Tony (Top Gun, Days of thunder), at least at the beginning – which at the dawn of the eighties of the so-called “ebb” (as it was defined) built the advertising aesthetics of the years to come, based on the patina and the saturation of colors, which then overflowed practically in all sectors and not only in cinema.
But here we are beyond all this. Whether they recognize it or not, the authors and the production seem aware that situations and characters are now discharged images of a substance that once was. And that find meaning, paradoxically, only because the great pains of the past of these characters leave us completely indifferent: for a contrasting effect this painful past, recalled with flashbacks of a South America from Barilla commercials revisited in a truculent version, restores strength and consistency to the pains of the present, especially true for the pair of mercenary brothers, one black and one white.
I am like the Willy the Coyote in the brilliant cartoons of Chuck Jones, who after being crushed and flattened like a sole crashing into a ravine, immediately finds the original two-dimensionality, here understood as consistency, density and more simply humanity as opposed to vanity and the fear of death – here called “destiny” – which hides behind the frenzy as an end in itself of speed for speed.
The bullet train has disrupted the space-time system of the aesthetics of cinema and the imaginaries connected to them, and has escaped into an “other” dimension that includes a return to origins, even within hybridization. In short, Bullet train looks like nothing else seen so far in Hollywood and is good news for the American dream machine, now too clinging to decline sequels of the great hits of previous decades, from Matrix ad Avatarperhaps due to the onset of an ill-concealed insecurity.
As for the International Competition, he has already reserved us a great unexpected, hypnotic film, perhaps a masterpiece: the Portuguese brave nation (Brave, or brave nation) by Carlos Conceição.
Immersed in splendid and mighty landscapes (never glossy), often nocturnal, very visual and little spoken, dreamlike and realistic, it manages to thrill the viewer on often minimal events, thus managing to give the impression of being, among other things, an action movie. We often tend to forget that Portugal’s colonial past does not only concern Brazil but also Angola, and above all also another continent besides the American one: Africa.
Here there are not many Africans, the white soldiers stand out, despite the setting in 1974, when the Salazar dictatorship collapses, liberating this territory as well, even if later on with independence there will be other hard tests.
The film is a condensation of the suggestions and atmospheres of a great visionary and at the same time “third world” work of the seventies, as well as – as explicitly claimed in the director’s note – a powerful and original metaphor of the temporal circularity of the various fascisms from which we Westerners seem incapable of wanting to get out, still imprisoned by mental schemes made up of false certainties and bloodless rhetoric. But the film flies so high that it broadens the metaphor to the many walls, both mental and physical (of Trump, Israel, etc.) until it surpasses them and leaves them behind as ridiculous vestiges of an unhealthy obsession in one of the most beautiful endings seen at the cinema in recent years. And in creating an explicit and subtle metaphor it produces (in this respect a bit like in Bullet train) a space-time short circuit between the static of 1974 and the ultra-fast world of mobile phones of today. Rarely will the absurdity of certain social reasoning have found such a perfect film form in making evident a mental prison that oppresses us all. And Conceição, mindful of Jacques Tourneur’s refined black and white horror films (The kiss of the panther, I walked with a zombie…), in his historical reflection made of the same substance of dreams contiguous to nightmares, he works with fine chiselling to show the violence as little as possible, in working off-screen in subtracting, representing the colonial horrors, paradoxically to better stage that horror, that historical monstrosity that doesn’t want to die.
brave nation it is the confirmation that Portuguese cinematography is the most original and vital in Europe and consequently our wish for the film is that it will find a good Italian distribution.
Always in the competition there is Stone turtle by Ming Jin Woo, who works on allegories and archaic myths to represent the oppression of women in Malaysia, amidst injustices, dramas and murders. The continuous dream sequences of death and resurrection in a remote island tell of the difficulty of breaking a cycle made of revenge instead of justice, under the perennial male oppression. A very strong theme also in another good feature film, the Indian Ariyippu by Mahesh Narayanan, with a more realistic register but with a beautiful atmosphere as well as fine in the representation of psychologies and behaviors in a difficult social and work context, that of immigrants in the Kerala of the pandemic.