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Locarno Film Festival 2016: By the Time It Gets Dark, Mister Universo, Pow Pow, Rat Film, & More

At most festivals, such curious objects as The Ornithologist or The Human Surge would likely remain the exception rather than the rule, but then Locarno isn’t most festivals.

Locarno Film Festival 2016: By the Time It Gets Dark, Mister Universo, Pow Pow, Rat Film, & More
Photo: Locarno Film Festival

At most festivals, such curious objects as João Pedro Rodrigues’s The Ornithologist or Eduardo Williams’s The Human Surge would likely remain the exception rather than the rule, but then Locarno isn’t most festivals. As the competition moved into its second half, two equally strange, equally challenging films continued the tradition of the festival’s opening days. The starting point for Thai director Anocha Suwichakornpong’s second feature, By the Time It Gets Dark, is the 1976 massacre carried out by police on protestors at a Bangkok university. One of the film’s opening scenes restages this shattering event while adding an extra representational layer: Not only are the prostrate students shown moaning and shuddering before their tormenters, but also flashed on the screen are grainy black-and-white photographs that freeze their anguished gestures in time.

With the differences in how images capture the past thus established from the outset, the action shifts to a country abode, where a director (Visra Vichit-Vadakan) prepares her next film by conducting interviews with a writer (Rassami Paoluengtong) who survived the massacre, though a waitress (Atchara Suwan) who serves them ventures that the two women might be better off switching roles. There are flashbacks to the writer’s experiences, intermingled with talk of history, mushrooms, and frustrated telekinesis, before a brief montage that splices together a sequence from a Méliés film, blooming mold, and a tropical bird ushers in something else entirely.

From here on out, nothing in the film is stable, as its genre, visual style, narrative, even its very images, are apt to shift without warning: a documentary-like sequence showing tobacco production gives way to the making of a garish music video; an airy portrait of the singer’s (Arak Amornsupasiri) everyday life is interrupted by a slightly chintzier version of the writer and director’s earlier meeting; and yet another director starts color grading sections of the film as both she and the audience look on, before glitches eventually tear its frames apart.

The only tangible link between these glittering narrative shards is the figure of the waitress, who pops up toiling away in the background of almost every new setting, an ordinary figure entrusted with gluing together an extraordinary film. Although By the Time It Gets Dark’s perpetual transitions could easily feel jarring, Suwichakornpong handles them so intuitively that they unfold with rhythmic finesse, while the film’s ever-shifting form is actually the perfect vehicle for exploring her subject matter. In a country where massacres don’t enter the history books and past and present remain locked in a stagnant embrace, perhaps a filmmaker’s only possible response is to calmly sift through all the many ways of depicting the status quo before realizing that none of them are truly adequate. For all cinema’s beautiful manifestations, it can never quite capture history’s unruly backward flow.

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The Dreamed Path is equally interested in exploring reality via fragmentation, even if German director Angela Schanelec’s slivers of human experience are at once more homogeneous and more abstract. The film’s opening scene provides an uncharacteristic flicker of levity, as a young couple, Theres (Miriam Jakob) and Kenneth (Thorbjörn Björnsson), start busking in front of a Greek tourist attraction, giving a droll rendition of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” as the hat in front of them jingles with coins. It’s 1984 and a nearby demonstration is debating the pros and cons of Greece’s EU membership, before the outside world recedes from view when Kenneth receives word that his mother has been injured in an accident.

The lovers return to Theres’s native Germany, before Kenneth moves on to England to complete the wrenching task of supporting his parents. Theres gets a teaching job in Berlin and the film moves suddenly and imperceptibly to the German capital in the present, now following an actress (Maren Eggert) in the throes of leaving her partner (Phil Hayes). While Kenneth and Theres’s actions are already presented in fragments that barely come together to form a plot, the move into the present brings with it an even greater degree of abstraction. A film is shot, books are examined or packed up, images of the tropics rear their head, children kick balls or swim together, and people move through space like impassive sleepwalkers, as if life were composed of the disparate stages of an inscrutable dream.

In the absence of obvious cause and effect and anything more than the most fleeting of connections between its two sets of characters, The Dreamed Path relies instead on a system of repeating gestures to give it cohesion: bags and suitcases being packed and unpacked, hands exchanging objects or money, feet stationary or on uncertain terrain, bodies passing through doorways or lying in forlorn repose, their perversely emotional effect amplified by the tight Academy-ratio frame. If there are distinct echoes of Robert Bresson in Schanelec’s approach, none of her character’s gestures bring them transcendence, which isn’t to say that her worldview is without hope. While The Dreamed Path depicts existence as quiet, desperate stasis, untouched by the repercussions of relationships, politics, or even time itself, solace lies in the fact that children are still capable of moving and being moved. Schanelec has never enjoyed the same attention of many others awkwardly subsumed under the banner of the Berlin School, a fact which this bracing new work will hopefully change. To tie her austere, yet deeply felt vision to a particular trend is anyway a denial of its pure singularity.

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With so much wonderfully challenging fare on display throughout Locarno’s competition slate, it was clear that some more traditional crowdpleasers would also be necessary. Based on the reactions in theaters at least, the festival audiences seemed to love both Austria-based directing couple Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel’s Mister Universo and Egyptian veteran Yousry Nasrallah’s Brooks, Meadows and Lovely Faces, two likable works that don’t stand up to sustained scrutiny.

Mister Universo is the documentary-inflected tale of a young lion-tamer named Tairo working at an Italian circus that has seen better days. His life goes off the rails when he mislays the lucky iron amulet that was given to him as a child by the titular strongman, triggering a journey across Italy to meet other members of the extended circus family to see if a new charm can be found. Tairo meets friendly soul after friendly soul, with each episode composed of the same well-observed blend of reminiscences, meandering chitchat, and photogenic knick-knacks. The warmth of the film stock merges with the unrelenting warmth of the people to such an extent, however, that even the hint of any rough edges is smoothed away and an almost cloying sense of niceness emerges. For a portrait of a livelihood under threat in a country currently riven with social and economic tensions, Mister Universo’s wall-to-wall sugaring carries a peculiar aftertaste.

Meanwhile, Nasrallah’s unabashedly sudsy film is essentially one lengthy flashback to the month before an important local dignitary visits a small Egyptian town, an unlikely mélange of enough wedding dynamics, romantic dalliances, drug deals, deaths in the family, and exit strategies to fill an entire year. There’s no shortage of winningly bright colors, delicious dishes, and pumping music, but Nasrallah seems a bit overwhelmed when it comes to making all the film’s many moving parts work as one, with the constant stream of characters and odd shifts in tone frequently creating confusing, even incoherent moments. Perhaps the key to enjoying Brooks, Meadows and Lovely Faces is to simply see it as a soap opera and nothing more, a cheerful wash of over-emphatic acting, moods, and narrative twists that would probably come across as less slight outside of the competition setting.

Two American documentaries that manage to be both ambitious and entertaining were tucked away in the festival’s Signs of Life section, a sidebar dedicated to films that attempt to push beyond standard categories. Both Robinson Devor’s Pow Wow and Theo Anthony’s Rat Film are just as interested in the hallucinatory as they are in the real, two always engaging portraits of weird America that feel like they could float off into the ether at any time. Devor’s film actually spends long stretches looking down upon its central location from the sky, a Californian country club complete with golf course whose unlikely placement in the midst of the Coachella desert is emphasized again and again in a series of hypnotic aerial shots.

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This is an area where tribal history, upper-class privilege, Wild West nostalgia, and violent crime all coexist, with Devor using the Native American approach to storytelling mentioned by one of his protagonists as the structural motivation for how he moves back and forth between each of the themes: A conversation simply resumes when it should resume. Devor’s camera only gives a brief visual introduction to each of his protagonists before heading off somewhere else, with each of the resultant voiceovers then being interrupted at will. As the number of narrators increases and their stories begin to merge, the film develops into a seductive stream of consciousness given direction by this place’s wrinkles both past and present, each couched in surreal, dreamlike images that only add to the sense of growing intoxication.

Aside from its perhaps inevitable inability to bring all its stories to a satisfying conclusion, Pow Wow’s subject matter is also by now all too familiar, as the weirdness of America becomes considerably less weird when it’s over exposed. The same criticism can also be applied to one of the threads running through Rat Film, whereby Baltimore residents either find bizarre ways of killing rodents or equally bizarre ways of expressing their love for them, with the fact that these documentary-aping scenes are staged not making their message any less obvious. Luckily, however, the film’s other two threads are anything but obvious, one a video game that has progressive layers of the Maryland capital’s streetscape mapped onto it, the other the charts and reports stemming from decades of research carried out at John Hopkins University on the connection between areas of human deprivation in the city and the presence of rats.

Strange, often troubling ideas ripple through both of these strands, with the heavily processed half-human, half-computer voiceover that explains them making them sound all the more uncanny: the discovery that Google Maps reads certain features in cities as faces and thus also blurs them out; the fact that the lines on the street plan that divide Baltimore’s wealthy from its poor were drawn very much deliberately; the experiment which established that when too many creatures are forced into a confined space, the consequences are apocalyptic. But the smartest idea up Anthony’s sleeve is that extrapolating from real world horrors allows them to resonate all the louder, an idea that finds expression in the solar systems that burst forth when too much information is processed or in the realization of where exactly the voiceover is narrating from. Maybe the most frightening of documentaries is a documentary in the future tense.

The Locarno Film Festival runs from August 3—13.

James Lattimer

James Lattimer is a programmer, critic, and filmmaker. He is a guest artistic curator for Documenta Madrid, a programmer for the Berlinale Forum, and a programming consultant for Viennale.

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