06 July 2011, 17:44 Culture

Beethoven in horror

The VOICES festival opened in Vologda

Ksenia Rozhdestvenskaya (Vologda) The second international film festival VOICES opened in Vologda: Claudia Cardinale broke a plate, and rough festival cinema competes with “zombie week.”

One aspiring and still unknown Russian film director, working on his first film, said: “I noticed that almost everyone’s first films are brilliant, the second are terrible. How can one contrive this and immediately film a normal third one?”

This, of course, is not a law, but you can check these words at the VOICES festival of young European cinema, which opened on July 5 in Vologda. The festival shows debut or second directorial works. VOICES has been in existence for the second year, that is, it still fits the definition of a “debut” event.

But everything looks like a “normal” third time: a fairly strong competition program, out-of-competition hits like “Lisbon Mysteries” by Ruiz and “Melancholia” by von Trier, among the guests are Krzysztof Zanussi , Paolo Taviani and Claudia Cardinale.

Cardinale, who received the unexpected title of the festival's muse, in her years, we won't say, has such a reserve of energy that compared to her, the hare from the battery advertisement is a pitiful slowdown. She walks around Vologda dancing, and in her presence all the men somehow get along and try to look cooler. Even the governor of the Vologda region, Vyacheslav Pozgalev , slightly blushing, said from the stage during the opening ceremony that in his youth Cardinale’s portrait hung in his room. And then he asked the actress to break a plate with the VOICES logo “for luck.” She broke it, jumped away enthusiastically, and then spent a long time pointing out the fragments to the governor - either asking him to go more carefully, or worrying about who would clean up.

In general, the opening of the festival had everything you needed: Claudia Cardinale, the red carpet, even the presenters with awkward jokes in the spirit of wedding entertainers: “To watch so many films, you need the health of steel!” - "Yes! And our sponsor just produces the most steel in Russia!”

Ten films are participating in the competition, the main prize will be 30,000 euros: 20,000 to the director and 10,000 to the Russian distributor of the winning film. The jury, led by Oscar-winning director Hugh Hudson , warns that it will not make allowances for the inexperience of the contestants. This year the festival is taking place as part of the cross-year of Italy-Russia and Spain-Russia, so outside the competition there are special programs “Spanish Fiesta” and “Roman Holiday”.

In general, the film life of Vologda looks frighteningly diverse.

“Transformers 3” goes to the cinema in the morning, in the afternoon – as part of VOICES – “The Strange Case of Angelica” by Manoel de Oliveira, in the evening VOICES presents Alexander Sokurov with the “Talent without Borders” prize, and the next day a completely different festival begins at the local multiplex – horror films, divided into “maniac week”, “killer week”, “zombie week” and so on. When there is so much, it is not so easy to attract audiences to competition films. But there are quite a lot of people at the shows. This year the competition has expanded - shows are also taking place in Cherepovets.

As for the competitive films, two mysterious films were shown on the first day of the festival - the Slovenian drama “The Father” and the Belgian existential thriller “May 22”. In both, the plot is not as obvious as it seems at first glance, so after the film the audience seriously figured out who was dreaming what. “The Father” by Vlado Scafara, which took part in the “week of criticism” at the Venice Film Festival last year, is a transparent and tender film about the relationship between a “Sunday” father and his young son. Sunday is painted in completely different colors than gloomy Monday, and it is unknown whether it actually was Sunday. May 22nd Billed as a fantasy/thriller/drama, Cohen Mortier's is also a dreamlike story, with striking, breathless camerawork and moments of pure surrealism. There is an explosion in a department store, and the department store security guard tries to see if he could have made a difference. He runs around an empty city covered in meaningless graffiti and talks to the dead.

Unfortunately, in the middle of the film you get tired of it, and all the plot lines are not woven into one cord.

In Lisa Langseth's Swedish film Towards Something Beautiful, the Natalie Portman -like heroine , uncorrupted by Tchaikovsky, wants to dance her Black Swan, namely not to lose her job as a secretary at a concert hall in Gothenburg. The heroine is a girl from the outskirts, she has an explosive character, life is hard, although, as she explains to the social worker, she has already stopped toiling around with foolishness - “sucking dicks and sitting on Facebook.” Now she listens to music, and Mozart turns out to be a drug more powerful than Facebook. The next drug, a harder one, is Beethoven, and then she is hooked on the standard junkie set: poetry, love, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard. The movie is too feminine (all men are bastards, including Kierkegaard), but fascinating. The drama about a difficult teenager becomes a melodrama, and then, after a pause, falls into a thriller. Beethoven is Beethoven (it’s time for the seventh symphony to have its own IMDB page), but when the heroine gets really bad, a pop song still sounds behind the scenes.

In the drama “Father,” the son tells why he loves the tree: it is “something of an unusual shape, rough and rarely talked about.” In principle, this is the ideal definition of festival cinema. Except that they talk about festival cinema more often than about a tree. But rough, yes.