With a questionable record, the real Locarno winner comes from Lebanon – Francesco Boille

The 75th edition of the Locarno film festival ended with a film that is both an enchanted vision and a political and denouncing work. IS Hikayat elbeit elorjowani. Tales of the purple house by the Franco-Iraqi director Abbas Fahdel, shot in Lebanon and starring his wife Nour Ballouk, Lebanese and painter. And with a questionable palmarès even if it delivered the second award, in order of importance in the hierarchical scale, to the excellent Italian film Gigi reads it by Alessandro Comodin about whom we wrote in the previous breaking latest news from the festival.

But let’s start with Abbas Fahdel’s extraordinary film, one of the most important in recent years. It was the only long work of both the international competition and the directors section of the present, the main parallel section. Lasting just over three hours, within a selection that favored normal or short durations, such as Story Fairytales by Alexander Sokurov (78 minutes), every millimeter of the film has meaning and density, also capturing the audience who in fact cheered strongly at the first screening we witnessed.

Total osmosis
For Fahdel it is a new artistic exploit after the documentary-masterpiece Homeland. Iraq year zero (2015) and the fiction film Childrena pearl presented in competition at Locarno in 2018 and about which we had written with emotion, a film in which the director somehow took up the neorealist lesson like the Indian Satyajit Ray and then the Iranian Abbas Kiarostami, but focusing the narration instead that on a boy on a girl, Yara in fact, is set in the Qadisha valley, in northern Lebanon, since 1998 inscribed in the Unesco world heritage list.

Tales of the purple house makes the cohabitation of opposites a natural fact: just as documentary and fiction are indistinguishable here, so are real and reproduced nature (from cinema as from painting), art from art (cinema that reproduces painting ), the intimate and the collective, the beautiful and the ugly, the gravity of the war and the economic situation with the poetic and human sense in relating as much to everyday life as to nature, action with contemplation. They are two legs of the same body, osmosis is total. And it basically reflects the political plan.

Filming the great demonstrations against the corruption of power, he not only documents with relevance, but also portrays and transmits the positive energy that pervades the population of which the frequently filmed songs are proof: joyful and combative, apparently a little rhetorical, they are lacking of references to opposing religious factions, we speak only of the Lebanese people. With insistence it is all the people, a single people, who feel oppressed and offended. It is clear, however, that power, and democratic governments seem accomplices beyond official declarations and positions, is playing on the weariness of the population, trying to empty this energy by making every daily gesture difficult for survival. While a serious international plan would today be a unique opportunity to stabilize that country and in part that area, affected in particular by the war in Syria.

The images of the war with Israel in 1982 and of the countless victims in the civilian population, especially among children, follow one another like those of the terrible fire following the devastating explosion of 4 August 2020 at the port of Beirut and the popular indignation that followed. . In between, many fragments of beautiful reality and daily courage. Collective gatherings follow one another on the top of a mountain where the most beautiful sunsets in the world are outlined, of a red so intense and enveloping that if they were not reality they would seem aesthetic excesses, or the light green of the valleys and agricultural fields, a natural green so vibrant as to seem almost psychedelic, shot over and over.

And then the newspaper, with Nour – narrator and guide of the film while Abbas is present but always off screen – who befriends a child whose father has growing financial difficulties, a child who returns regularly to the film, for example in a small garden with his little sister, or when Nour accompanies him to a Syrian refugee camp who are listened to for a long time, or when they visit a man who takes care of abandoned dogs. To be highlighted is always a human gaze, imbued with empathy.

And then, almost of the curtains, the daily life of the couple’s cats, numerous, intent on doing their job with great rigor, if we can say so, of cats: to keep up with anything that moves, to check all the surrounding area well. it is a job that always finds its proper rest as when two children sleep embraced similarly to each other while the third plays with the thick tail of one of the other two, throwing it on one side as on the other. The animals in this film dominated by the restrictions of the pandemic are important, they are brothers of humans.

All framed and continuously pervaded by art, by the sense of seeing as a founding tool to rediscover the profound meaning of things: Nour’s paintings, often centered on elements of nature, intersect with cinema, creating subtle epiphanies thanks to inserted extracts. with wisdom, from the great poet of life caught in the minimal, Yasujirō Ozu, to the poet of the beauty of nature caught in its light and in its most hidden interstices, Victor Erice, passing through the poet of metaphysics right up to the decomposition of the world Andrei Tarkovskij, and several others. But this question about life and vision, which includes photography in relation to photography in motion (cinema), is strong because it is high, ethical but without rhetoric or excesses of sophistication, rather it is simple and human even if within a refined construction, as are the works of real artists.

Also for this Tales of the purple house, in any case the winner of the ecumenical jury prize, is certainly our Golden Leopard. But we believe Abbas Fahdel did the work that we felt the strong need and that was missing in the festival until its screening in the last days: something fresh and profound together on the world of today and on the world of always, that is on what is perennial. . Perhaps his cinema is now ready for other places of cinema, such as the Venice exhibition, which in recent years has given great space to the auteur documentary often putting it in competition, or Cannes, in sections such as the Quinzaine des réalisateurs, or Un certain regard or the same competition in the case of a new fiction such as Childrengiven that the Locarno festival shows him great loyalty but the juries do not seem to follow.

It strongly disappoints the palmarès, it must be said. The winning film of the Golden Leopard, the Brazilian rule 34 (Rule 34) by Júlia Murat, here in his third long, has original and truly unconventional ideas, it does not follow today’s univocal logic (in this case: unconditional adherence to the question of gender, or racial, or hatred if not hatred towards these issues). And in this respect he is truly remarkable, also for how he was able to outline characters and situations. But it is a film that you do not want to see again: visually it does not exist, there is hardly anything else to discover besides what you have seen. And so it is, sorry to say, for other award-winning titles like the Costa Rican I have electric dreams by Valentina Maurel or gay comedy At night the cats are brown by the Swiss Valentin Merz. They are boring films not because they are slow, but because they are obvious and stop at the utterance or still superficial and falsely provocative even when they let themselves be seen (the gay film).

We don’t know if politically correct played, but there were as wonderful and intense films to reward as the Azerbaijani A Sermon to the Fishes (Sermon to the fish) by Hilal Baydarov or the Portuguese brave nation by the almost debutant Carlos Conceição – of which we wrote in the first breaking latest news – great film on colonialism or, more on the classic, the excellent French comedy about teenagers Stella is in love by Sylvie Verheyde or finally the Italian The pataffio by Francesco Lagi, imperfect but funny and original costumed farce in theaters from 18 August. Among the many quality films, this year Locarno has had a fall on female films, whether made by women or not: but after having done it for years in an excellent way compared to many other festivals, it is a failure that can also be allowed.