The worst is not the absurdity of all this. The worst part is that, in addition, it is infinite, it never ends. Come on, it doesn't even happen fast. On this elementary precept, Roy Andersson has long been determined to make a film so rigorous in its nonsense, so persistent in silence, so clairvoyant in its detailed description of nothing, that there is nothing left but to surrender. From the hand of one of the most peculiar, short and perfect filmographies that recent cinema has given, all his work wants to be something like a banal treatise, a delicate study of everything that makes human beings. What is neither its essence itself nor, even less, its humanity: neither being nor human.

'About Endlessness', presented on Tuesday in Venice, can be understood as an epilogue to his particular trilogy of existence that closed with the brilliant Golden Lion of 2014 ' A dove perched on a branch reflect on existence '. Already at the time, Andersson himself pointed out that the trilogy could be tetralogy. There will be more, for sure. Again, the characters with their faces erased by white chalk; again, the perfect composition (or decomposition) of a world placed between reality and the dream itself; as always, a script that leaves the possibility of expression among the gaps of words. As living paintings inspired by the detailed iconography of Otto Dix, Brueghel the Elder or Georg Scholz , the camera is placed in the right place, not a millimeter outside the mark, to portray just the void. But with a lot of detail. What's more, everything is detail. And that with the idea of ​​building a tragic universe in its comic or hilarious in total absence of prejudice.

"I've seen a man ..." introduces a 'off' voice from scene to scene that describes exactly what he sees. And over there appears a couple in love that flies over the ruins of a destroyed city; a man who remembers bitterly that a former classmate did not greet him on the street; a priest who, in a palmarial abandonment of duties, has stopped believing in God, or, why not, a depressed dentist. And hitler. Hitler also comes out. They all share the same sense of strange infinity, but far from rejoicing for so much eternity, they simply accept it. No hard feelings. As always, like every piece of Andersson cinematographic porcelain, masterful.

The wreck of Egoyan

Absurd by absurd, the turn was for Atom Egoyan . In fact, he had the honor of appearing on the show as the movie of the day. And, again, as in almost all of his works since the beginning of the decade, the Canadian director makes confusion the only feature of identifiable style. 'Guest of honor' tells the story of a father and a daughter who are piled up with traumas. He tries to get ahead after the successive deaths of his wife (cancer) and his lover (fire). She, in prison for error and for a crime of abuse of a child, refuses to clarify the truth of what happened and insists on being held in prison on account of a previous sin of childhood. In between, a suicide, a white rabbit and a jealous bus driver. If they find it strange or confusing, it is what it is all about.

The director proposes, as is the norm in his last and less inspired works, a wired structure of 'flashbacks', parallel stories and multiple versions of the same event. The problem is, again, the absurd. But not the absurd disconcerting and provocative of Andersson, but the other, of much worse quality. To the surprise of the unsuspecting, the whole story is told in the first half hour of footage. And from there, it barely moves. The film remains on alert awaiting something extraordinary, surprising or at least serious to justify it , and nothing. There is no way.

Let's say that, in an unwanted way, the feeling of dissatisfaction and even the certainty of the fudge ends without wanting to become the only true thing of 'Guest of honor' and, therefore, all of it is also a beautiful unconscious metaphor for all this. And here, now yes, Andersson and Egoyan share the same vertigo. Camus writes that the absurd is the state of the soul in which emptiness becomes eloquent. Well, that. And, in addition, and contrary to what it may seem, it lasts longer than the account.

The Holocaust as an exhibition

Finally, the official section closed the most ambitious project of how many have seen so far from Mostra. And also, and in its own way, perfectly absurd. By stark and brutal. 'The painted bird', by Czech Vaclav Marhoul, adapts Jerzy Kosinski's autobiographical reminiscent book that tells the story of a Jewish child in Poland during World War II in the most merciless way. In this case, as expected, the absurd is a beast that bites: the Shoah.

The director has spent almost ten years in completing a three-hour movie that advances mercilessly through a hell populated with racists, xenophobes, pedophiles, murderers, unlearned ... As now, but infinitely worse. The tape runs in rigorous black and white through an area of ​​the devastated soul and stays there to live. Composed of prints that function as independent chapters, 'The painted bird' is limited to piling catastrophes on the tiny body of its protagonist. There are neither injured nor prisoners, all dead.

And this is where the problems begin, at the limit of what can be said, at the border of the most brutal. The crude portrait of the rawness itself is poorly sympathetic with that constant gloating in the catastrophe that almost the entire film shows. And it is understood with difficulty that impudent and exhibitionist preciousness in the composition of the images to approach the seriousness of the treaty. The effort to build a sinister fable around the most sinister chapters of recent history is achieved only at times. In others, the most unpleasant and shameless, the accumulation of precipices ends in an unforgivable parody. And that, not anymore. For absurd, in the most painful, not existential, of the senses.

It bothered Camus, again, the unreasonable silence of the world and that he also called absurd. If I had been in Venice on Tuesday, I would have been as little surprised at the endless polysemy of his beloved absurdity.

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