Henri Bergson maintains that any laugh is nothing but a product of our evil. All the jokes, he continues, are malicious. White humor does not exist, it always stains something: a little blood, a tear, a gesture of despair ... We laugh for the simple reason that we are by nature resentful animals. It bothers us that they impose restrictions on us, and that they are also imposed on us without any reason. That's what living in society consists of. Freud , of course, equated the mechanism that releases laughter with that of dreams. In both cases, the repression disappears in a process of desalienación that, to good ones, we could call orgiastic. And so.
Todd Phillips , architect not by chance of Resacón in Las Vegas , is exhibited as an accomplished reader of the intuition philosopher and delivers the most stark refutation of almost everything in Joker . It is not, despite what may seem by the title and Batman , a superhero movie. Nor, despite the laughter, does it approach comedy. And far from the intention of this prodigy present itself as a rereading of any myth. From the first to the last frame, everything is simply denial, resentment, bad intention. And, from there, the laughs. And the chaos.
The film places a poor clown in the middle of any city. Gotham City maybe. He works for a clowns company that, like all of them, is dedicated to making people happy. You know, he sings songs, he falls, howls, cries because grief overwhelms him and he falls again. It is a sentimental. The carablanca goes to the hospitals to make sick children laugh, encourages the birthdays of rich children, serves as an advertising claim for cholesterol temples and, if necessary, murders three unpresentable bullies in the subway. In reality, the latter does not appear in the agreement. It happens by accident. The problem is that it's funny. It makes the same grace as ridicule a poor psycho who thinks he's funny.
And so, on the last paragraph, Phillips, with the invaluable collaboration of a huge (again) Joaquin Phoenix , raises the most disconcerting metaphor of who we are and the world we step on. The director says that his film is not political but that he has no qualms about others creating it.
And indeed it is. And it is with the same violence and clarity that were Taxi driver and The King of Comedy , the two films by Martin Scorsese that delimit the perimeter of references of this one. Not in vain, it is Robert de Niro , protagonist of the two aforementioned tapes, which in the role of the eventual conductor of a talk-show gives the replica to the main character that everything can. And annihilate.
All the plot, supported both by the pyrotechnics of the interpretation of the protagonist and by the twilight and eighties photography of Lawrence Sher (made, by the way, in the image and likeness of that of master Michael Chapman ), rests in the certainty that the most atrocious of injustices, depending on what circumstances, ends up being identical to the most honest of the acts.
And now, the distance between comedy and tragedy is nothing more than a matter of nuance ( Sennett said that the first is when you fall into a ditch and kill yourself. The second is when you get a stepfather). As it is already a common place, Batman (which does not appear) and Joker are, in effect, the same person.
The entire film is obsessively fed by the decomposed gesture of its actor. His face, before and after masking himself by painting, literally occupies each frame. And from there it advances through a long and disconsolate corridor of broken glass. Of resentment, we said. The argument is reduced to its minimum expression or, better, the argument is just the fever that messes everything up. There are childhood traumas, but the focus is another. There are accounts that settle with society, but revenge is not the engine of action.
Madness appears as origin, but nothing justifies. Violence is not an expression of anything, but cause and meaning of everything. If for a moment they think there are enough elements to believe that all of the above is nothing more than a vague or precise expression, according to social class, of what is seen daily on the news, maybe they are even right.
The result, in short, is a film that makes the perversity of its internal logic the reason for a loud laugh. With the worst of intentions. Pure resentment. It hurts so much that there is nothing left but to laugh. It is what clowns have that like memes , monologists and Twitter threads make grace. Fucking grace .
Pablo Larraín, near the golden lion
Each film by Pablo Larraín to date has been cause for concern. And the enthusiasm. For his insistence on always focusing where there is no light. In his hands, the entire drama of the most horrific of dictatorships is aired in a dark disco ( Tony Manero ), in a funeral home ( Post Mortem ) or in a prison house for pedophile priests ( The club ). And each portrait of necessarily famous or mythical characters ( Neruda or Jackie ) consists of an exercise of emptying and nakedness equivalent to tearing off the same skin. It matters what is behind the camera, what is hidden from the eye. The aesthetics in your hands is always, by force, political.
His new movie, Ema , is the same and quite the opposite. To situate ourselves, it is the most free, brilliant and personal film exercise that has been seen so far in this Mostra and that offers a new aspect in the director's filmography, always so prone to distances or simple cynicism. This time everything is life, pure and simple vertigo. Again, the camera becomes where the spotlights are gone, but this time to flood it all with light. And, again, also from a deeply political sense of aesthetics.
The tape tells the story of a couple who, on a bad day, returns their adopted son. Gael García Bernal , on one side, and, attentive, an immense and enigmatic Mariana Di Girolamo on the other. And with that said, the synopsis, the arguments and the maps are over. Larraín's proposal sails untied by bodies that offer virgins to everything and everyone: pain, pleasure, sex and dance. Yes, you dance for the same reason you live and, above all, you fuck (with forgiveness), for the inertia offered by the principle of vitality that moves everything. Of course, dance in the street and dance reggaeton . Even if it hurts.
The result is the first obvious candidate for a Golden Lion the less different. If only for the ease and ease with which the film poses the imposture of each common place. From Ema , which is also melodrama, not even the dirtiest of the perreos will be contemplated in the same way. And, in short, that's what it's all about: looking again, looking first. And forever.
Costa-Gavras history lesson
Finally, the day closed with what happens to be the first film shot in Greece of the director of Greek origin Costa-Gavras . Behaving as adults counts the most vertiginous and difficult days of the Hellenic state: the 2015 crisis in which the country in southern Europe was about to stay out of, indeed, Europe.
From the outset, it should be clear that the version offered is that of the defeated finance minister Yanis Varoufakis and that the whole film revolves around the question still unanswered about why Alexis Tsipras , president of lefts in the Government, decided to accept the conditions of the Troika and ignore the result of the referendum he called. Let's say the puzzle is still standing (a strange dance takes its place in the movie). Although, the truth, once the elections are lost, as has just happened, the mystery is less mystery. But that is another matter.
The film works as the most refined lesson in history or, better, in the history of doors inside that strange institution of glass buildings and mahogany tables in which Europe has become. Suddenly, the characters of the news, always so formal, appear drawn as human beings consumed by all that consumes us: ambition, fear of ridicule, power and even ideals.
The director of Z or Missing , obviously, is anything but lukewarm. He takes sides and does so against a bureaucracy and essentially myopic politicians and far from the minimally enforceable. What remains is a film as revealing as sad.
If they think we are going wrong, they think like Gavras. And that Joker himself even.
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