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Zurich Film Festival 2016: Porto, Lady Macbeth, Two Lottery Tickets & More

Gabe Klinger’s Porto is less of a city symphony than a muted impressionist painting of urban drifting.

Zurich Film Festival 2016: Porto, La Reconquista, Lady Macbeth, & Two Lottery Tickets
Photo: Double Play Films

It’s generally agreed upon that one should allow themselves a few hours of decompression and acclimation when first landing in a faraway city, but as I drowsily touched down for the 12th annual Zurich Film Festival after an arduous 10-hour flight, time was not on my side, so I rushed instead to a film that captures something ineffable about the frazzled traveler’s mindset. Gabe Klinger’s Porto, my first taste of the festival at an evening showing, is about bemusedly roaming in half-light through a foreign city while periodically drifting in and out of recollections of a potent recent relationship gone sour.

The film deals with the post-one-night-stand fallout between an American drifter, Jake (Anton Yelchin), working abroad and a forlorn French woman, Mati (Lucie Lucas). Less a city symphony than a muted impressionist depiction of urban drifting, Porto takes place within the shadowy side streets, modest corner bars, and nondescript 24-hour diners of the titular Portuguese city, where Jake is burning time as a manual laborer. One night, Jake spots Mati and strikes up an exchange, which leads to a charged evening that gets played and replayed throughout the film, each time at slightly greater length and with a different emotional inflection. Stitching these sense memories together are jazz piano-backed montages of a disappointed Jake stumbling around their earlier haunts as though in a Resnais-like time loop.

Shot on 8mm, 16mm, and 35mm celluloid, and often in unforgiving available light, Porto’s images exude a palpable materiality that’s critical to its formal structure: The grainy, boxy smaller gauges are used to depict a frustrated present of botched opportunity, while the 35mm scope photography brings a comparative clarity to scenes of tender recollection. Aspect ratios and time were also crucial in Klinger’s last film, the documentary Double Play: James Benning and Richard Linklater, with which Porto shares a vested interest in the casually profound give-and-take of two-person conversations.

Klinger’s cutting rhythms, developed with co-editor Géraldine Mangenot, are rooted in patient observation of the physical and vocal nuances of his actors, meaning prolonged pauses between lines of dialogue are occasions to appreciate how Mati hesitatingly lights a cigarette, or the way Jake’s skeletal frame seems perpetually slumped forward in anticipation of something. The pair’s first meeting at an afterhours café, in which Jake musters up the courage to approach Mati at her table, contains only a few lines of dialogue and conjures some of the hushed electricity of a classic Bogart-Bacall encounter, a quality that’s also true of the subsequent, nearly wordless scene, covered in one traveling two-shot as Mati eagerly leads Jake back to her flat.

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While these moments subtly evoke Old Hollywood, the sequences in Mati’s sparsely furnished modern apartment echo the blocking and camerawork in Godard’s Contempt (Lucas even resembles Brigitte Bardot), and one moody sojourn at Jake’s fog-shrouded work site recalls the funereal atmosphere of Soviet war films like Ivan’s Childhood and Letter Never Sent. Klinger’s cine-literacy is well known to those familiar with his writing and programming, but what’s special about Porto, especially as a debut narrative feature, is the relative internalization of its influences, which feel secondary to its larger grappling with a timeless emotional enigma: namely, infatuation, and the question of how such a mighty force can also be so fleeting.

Another San Sebastian Film Festival import here in Zurich, Jonás Trueba’s La Reconquista also concerns itself with romantic love and the passing of time, in this case by portraying an evening shared in young adulthood by two former high school sweethearts, Olmo (Francesco Carril) and Manuela (Itsaso Arana). It’s a familiar, even generic idea for a story, and Trueba doesn’t evade first-love clichés: Of course the past lovers have “their” song, and at a pivotal moment anxieties are shed for a loose-limbed dance that revives old feelings.

The film’s surface banalities, however, gradually accrue tremendous heft through the persistence of Trueba’s gaze, which fixes on his leads in sturdy, minutes-long compositions so as to spot any flickers of emotion that might complicate the largely indirect pleasantries being spoken (the film stays mercifully shy of any explosions of bottled-up yearning or performative fireworks). The extensive scrutiny is unwarranted when, for the full duration of a song performed live at a lounge, we watch Olmo and Manuela nod along to lyrics that unambiguously poke at the latent energy between them, but in most cases Trueba’s disregard for the likelihood of provoking boredom enriches material that very easily could have been paint-by-numbers. His attentiveness and compositional style at times even recalls the work of Hong Sang-soo, only with Tsingtaos and rice wine in place of soju.

There’s a scene halfway through La Reconquista that a lesser work surely would have concluded on. The film’s integrity and complexity lie in the fact that it pushes well past this point, charting the ways in which Manuela and Olmo’s sentimental night sends ripples through daily reality, which eventually leads to an extended flashback/dream sequence featuring a teenage version of the couple. It’s a ploy that could have been disastrous, but with the help of some very game young actors (Pablo Hoyos and Candela Recio) who arguably upstage their older counterparts, Trueba’s willingness to court awkwardness by refusing to hurry through stock emotional beats becomes revelatory.

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It’s telling that the film’s most graceful scene, a lovely choreography of awkward bodies and hesitant words, comprises one of the hoariest tropes in the romance genre: a stroll in a park followed by a picturesque first kiss. It’s easy to find oneself resisting La Reconquista’s earnestness, but in the end I was moved. This is a scarily relatable film.

Over in the competition section, William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth migrates the action from its source material—Nikolai Leskov’s 19th-century novel that later became a Shostakovich opera—from Mtsensk, Russia to England’s misty and desolate Northumberland county. The frigid atmosphere follows in the shadow of Carl Theodor Dreyer, and there’s even a POV shot from the perspective of a living corpse being carried to death that’s lifted right from Vampyr. Otherwise, the gloomy Dane’s influence is felt in the frequent placement of the static camera parallel to walls, the emphasis on doors being forbiddingly shut, and the stiff arrangement of bodies in spartan interiors.

Oldroyd’s exacting formal scheme stresses the subjugation of the film’s heroine, Catherine (Florence Pugh), a 17-year-old arranged wife growing restless with the puritanical, patriarchal system to which she’s been condemned. Without beating around the bush for long, Lady Macbeth gets right to the work of feminist revisionism, depicting Catherine’s affair with a roughneck laborer (Cosmo Jarvis, underserved with a purely functional character) as an ecstatic release of erotic rebelliousness and a sudden awakening of true feeling in a loveless milieu. Despite Oldroyd’s formidable direction, however, his perspective on the material, as well as his point of empathy, wavers; the film’s third act, the unseemly events of which derive from Leskov, but with one critical detail altered, turns Catherine into a banal sociopath, copping out with “ambiguously” blank close-ups set to ominous minor-key droning instead of delivering on the promises of its feminist tract.

Two Lottery Tickets, meanwhile, is a film of commitment. “I think this is going to be a turning point in Romanian cinema,” announced executive producer Ovidiu Dunel-Stancu during a Q&A session that found the film’s makers sparing few kind words for their national cinematic trends. The gutsy declaration extended the sentiment of a key scene in the film in which one of its central characters, Sile (Alexandru Papadopol), dismisses his country’s big-screen output as “doom and gloom,” citing as evidence a touted recent production whose title he can’t recall (he’s referring to Christi Puiu’s 2001 film Stuff and Dough, widely perceived as the urtext of what would later become known as the Romanian New Wave, and a Papadopol vehicle to boot). If this overt intertext weren’t enough, the next layer of structural in-joke in director Paul Negoescu’s film is that it’s blatantly composed of the formal DNA of this critically lauded movement: one-shot-equals-one-scene composition, drab realist lighting, and a seldom-budging camera.

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Two Lottery Tickets’s mission is to find new possibilities in these (in)expressive tools—or rather, in its mining of the time-tested fundamentals of screen comedy, to restore old possibilities not yet fully exploited in the Romanian lexicon. Corneliu Poromboiu’s The Treasure arguably already worked this angle quite recently, but few will dispute that Two Lottery Tickets goes further in its deadpan gaggery. It aims to make its audience chortle continuously for 86 minutes, and for the most part it succeeds mightily.

The story concerns three friends, Dine (Dorian Boguță), Pompiliu (Dragoș Bucur), and the aforementioned Sihl, who take to the road after misplacing, or losing, or being robbed of, a winning lottery ticket. The uncertainty around the exact circumstances of the ticket’s disappearance is the fuel for Negoescu’s Laurel and Hardy-esque set pieces, many of which revolve around the trio of stooges—dressed in a wardrobe collection for the ages, featuring capris, shiny track jackets, and, least cool of all, sleeveless hoodies—barging into tenement housing units to fish information from residents, all of whom know next to nothing and are abetted little by the wishy-washy lines of questioning.

With the exception of one shot when the guys’ attention is directed off screen at a hitchhiker, Negoescu single-mindedly keeps all necessary information contained within his rigid, deep-focus frames, a strategy that calls to mind Roy Andersson’s single-panel drollery more than the slow-motion wordplay of his Romanian countrymen. Jokes often emerge from the background, as in the best and last punchline in a string of yuks triggered by a dispute with a policeman about a car’s paint job. And in the most striking detour from Romanian New Wave habits, Negoescu eschews determinism and a fixation of logic problems to surrender instead to the forces of chance, saving his funniest expression of this theme for the film’s throwaway postscript.

Even as my favorites of the festival so far lie outside its main stage, Negoescu’s breezy offering is the competition title to beat at this point, though many other promising works await. Living up to the stereotype of Swiss efficiency and organization, the festival is a well-oiled machine where screening lines move quickly, red-carpet swarms disperse promptly after the fanfare, and theaters are close together or speedily accessible by public transit. If the programming picks up later this week, I see no reason why this festival can’t get into the ring with other heavyweights in the years to come.

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The Zurich Film Festival runs from September 22—October 2.

Carson Lund

Carson Lund's debut feature as a DP and producer is Ham on Rye. He also writes for the Harvard Film Archive and is the frontman of L.A.-based chamber pop duo Mines Falls.

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