| Venice festival midway The Lido Film Festival has reached the halfway point, but one can already draw a flattering conclusion for the organizers: Venice 2003 is the most interesting and fruitful of the major film forums of recent years. Against the backdrop of the Berlin confusion and Cannes failure this year, what Moritz De Hadeln's team did in Venice looks especially advantageous. And by names (new works are represented by Lars von Trier, Bernardo Bertolucci, Jim Jarmusch, the Coen brothers, Babak Payami, Robert Rodriguez, Bruno Dumont...), and by films (there are no longer enough fingers for potential masterpieces shown in various programs one hand). There are, of course, faux pas. (These, in addition to the inexplicable gross errors in the catalog, include the inclusion in the main competition of Christopher Hampton’s craft project “Imagining Argentina,” which cynically exploits the country’s tragedy during the reign of the military junta; never before in my memory has almost the entire session been spent under incessant whistles and indignant cries of the audience, which burst into ironic applause only once - when Antonio Banderas, having sent his wife and daughter to the dungeons of the junta, took a guitar and melancholy strummed with the characteristic touches of El Mariachi.) But the main requirement - more good and different films - was impeccably fulfilled .
Good films need to be presented correctly - and the organizers succeeded in doing so. They deliberately blurred the public's attention. If previously the main competition was always considered the main thing and despondent crowds of critics and guests could hardly withstand the 12-day marathon of 100% auteur cinema (Venice has always been famous for its highbrow), now the program is structured in such a way that the parallel competition “Against the Tide” and out-of-competition programs are of no less interest -- “Criticism Week” and “New Territories.” Based on the emerging motley picture, where the rights of films by masters, short films of promising debutants, genre works, and program-experimental projects are equal in rights, it is quite possible to determine not only the personal preferences of the selectors, but also new trends that will shape the image of cinema in the near future. such a near future.
One of these trends was the emergence of documentary films from the ghetto. After the worldwide success of Bowling for Columbine (2002) by Michael Moore, it became obvious that documentaries were not going to be content with narrowly professional festivals and the nightly broadcast of intellectual TV channels. Nowadays, documentaries not only compete for the attention of the general public, but also actively participate in the formation of a new film language. Cinema is mastering the genre of conceptual projects, a kind of essay on philosophical, aesthetic and social topics.
The pioneer of the new direction, as one might expect, turned out to be the Dane Lars von Trier, the most restless and intelligent director of our time. His documentary work “Five Obstacles” (“Against the Current”) is precisely a project, fantastic, crazy, absurd and at the same time hitting the most painful point for today’s cinema. The story begins with Trier finding Danish film director Jorgen Leth in Haiti, the author of the short film An Ideal Man (1967), which Trier himself includes among his favorite films. Let, who has long since reached his seventh decade, receives an unusual offer: to make five remakes of “The Ideal Man,” each time guided by new rules imposed on him by Trier. The very first rule will give you an idea of the degree of absurdity to which Trier decisively elevates his admiration for Summer: each frame should be no longer than 0.5 seconds. But before our eyes, a strange exercise in style turns into a scrupulous study about the nature of creativity, about overcoming the distance between the author and the object of the image, about the fear of defeat, about the artist’s willingness to accept deliberate failure in order not to stop there, not to turn into a monument to himself to yourself. Years does not show such readiness, and Trier the provocateur himself writes the script for the fifth remake for him - a monologue of a talented and charming artist who did not find the strength to overcome himself and his time.
No less interesting was the documentary work of 14-year-old Hana Makmalbaf (Mohsen’s daughter and Samira’s sister) “The Joy of Madness” (“Criticism Week”). The Makmalbaf family, who have gone headlong into cinema, have filled all the major festivals with their works, is already becoming a reason for irony: evil critics are predicting that next year in Cannes we will see films of the Iranian classic’s pets. But Hana’s film turned out to be by no means a “daughter movie.” Only formally can it be called a documentary report from the filming of the film “At Five in the Evening” (this work by Samira Makmalbaf received the jury prize at Cannes 2003). In essence, “The Joy of Madness” turns out to be a frank and sometimes revealing document about the limitless power of images over reality, about the initial cynicism of the director’s profession and how the artist, wittingly or unwittingly, manipulates human destinies. “Don’t you want to act in films? - Dad Mohsen angrily asks the stubborn woman who does not give in to Samira’s sweet persuasion. — Do you know that the actress I directed in my previous film is now Iran’s ambassador to UNESCO? You’ll get a visa, go to the festival and travel with your boyfriend all over the world...” And the camera of Hana, the director and cameraman, is by no means naively capturing these tragicomic persuasion, these fluctuations between fear and thirst for fame, sympathy and exploitation.
And finally, the third significant documentary work shown in the first half of the festival in Venice was the film by the Austrian Ulrich Seidl “Jesus You Know” (the screening took place as part of the Venice Film Market - Venice screenings). Seidl, who started out as a documentarian, created a sensation in Venice two years ago with the fictional Heat of the Dog, a film about the everyday hell to which the sluggish, apathetic and cruel European middle class is doomed. In “Jesus” he returns to documentary films to remind us that it is not demons who live in this hell, but still people. Seidl's camera is installed in one of the Viennese churches, where it methodically records the prayers of middle-aged, ugly, shabby, in a word, ordinary townspeople. Here is an elderly woman praying for an easy and shameless death. Here is a 70-year-old man telling Jesus that his Bridget turned out to be not the woman with whom he is ready to live his whole life. Here is an ugly girl telling with bitterness how her boyfriend sowed somewhere the rings bought on the eve of the engagement that never took place. All this is not God knows how original, but Seidl, unlike most directors, has one and perhaps the main talent - the ability to finish things to the end, not to smooth over corners, not to avoid the most painful moments. If you wanted existential despair, you will get it in full.
However, fans of feature films of a more traditional format have not yet been bored in Venice. “Lost in Translation” by Sofia Coppola, “Antenna” by Kazuyoshi Kumakiri, “A Nation Without Women” by Manish Jha, “The Saddest Music in the World” by Guy Maddin and especially “Zatoichi” by Takeshi Kitano (perhaps the most cheerful and elegant work in the filmography of the Japanese director - and this despite the fact that about fifty people die picturesquely on screen from Kitano's samurai sword) - all these are pictures that deserve separate discussion. Read about them in the final reports of your correspondent. Alexey MEDVEDEV, Venice |
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