Ciro Guerra, Coetzee and the persistence of the barbarians

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Historically, the border is there to delimit the space of reason. Plato, to name the first, insisted on placing the precise barrier that separates science from mere belief or doxa ; what can be known in a straight and proper way from what is not. And after him, everyone else. The idea of ​​limit is always critical for refusal; it is demarcation or edge; It exists to separate. And if in the effort to establish an uncontaminated territory, the reason itself had been contaminated by its pure colonizing asepsis? Or, more poetically, what if the border were a window instead of a wall?

"I decided that when civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of a dependent people, it would be against civilization," read Awaiting the barbarians , by JM Coetzee , and on this idea Ciro Guerra builds a brilliant adaptation of that same novel that is also reasonable proposal for understanding. Can you ask for more?

The Mostra decided yesterday to terminate the official section and it is hard to imagine a better way to do it. The Colombian director of The Hug of the Snake and Summer Birds takes a further step in the construction of his particular voice. On a script by the South African novelist himself and with an international cast headed by Mark Rylance, Johnny Depp and Robert Pattinson, Guerra proposes the construction of a space that is both mythical and perfectly realistic (as in his previous works) committed to timely elaboration and it requires the metaphor of, indeed, the border, any of them and anywhere in the world.

The story of a magistrate is told in a colonial city on the edge of the desert , right on the edge of the empire. Within the walls, civilization imagines threats because it is in its nature to invent enemies against which to become strong. "The hidden intelligence of empires has only one fixed idea: how not to end, how not to succumb, how to prolong its era," he reads. Outside, barbarism. Or was it the other way around?

The director is limited to following the guideline of the text. With clarity, elegance and depth. Some nuances are lost (especially in the relationship between the main character and the 'barbarian' captive where the roles are exchanged and make sense of each other), but it is won in the power of evocation. The movie wants to be all of it, symbol. And as such it behaves. The characters are dragged by their doubts and brutality aware of being subjects of no time, no place and, at the same time, of all times and all places.

Surprising Rylance's subtlety in the role of the magistrate who has made the border his way of life and overwhelms Depp's confidence in the perfect representation of the consequent and even reasonable coldness of evil. He is the civilization that is condemned.

Ciro Guerra says that his story is not from the past, but from now . And that the xenophobic discourse is always the same and responds to the identical and barbaric habit of surviving empires, all of them. And indeed, it is. The result is a film as accurate in its approach as illuminated in its proposal. Unbeatable closure for a Mostra that, already, can be described as exceptional. An atrocity.

Palermo in the nude

Beside him, and also in competition, the Festival dared with a portrait of Italy itself so cruel and ruthless that it would be said even barbaric, again. Franco Maresco, from which Belluscone could be seen here in 2014 . A Sicilian storia , now presents La mafia non è più quella di una volta (The mafia is not what it was). Actually, this last work can be read as a continuation of the previous one.

In both cases, the director himself stands as an interlocutor of a camera that roams the streets of Palermo. And there, he is faced with two antithetical characters. On the one hand, the photographer and reporter Letizia Battaglia, a fundamental, ethical and epic character who, from the objective of her camera, built the image we have today of mafia crimes . On the other, the concert organizer ("Legal and illegal", in his words) Ciccio Mira, an unclassifiable businessman so close to the customs of the old mafia that he would call himself a gangster. Or almost.

And here comes the scandal: The mafia non è più quella di una volta attributes to the president of the Republic of Italy, the palermitano Sergio Mattarella, fraternal treatment with Ciccio Mira, even more serious if it is considered that Mattarella's brother died murdered by the Mafia and that the president has had a very important role in the departure of the Lega Nord from the Government.

Maresco is limited to record each of the contradictions of a city that has decided to forget everything. The murders of Judges Borsellino and Falcone are that, a thing of history books, and there are even doubts, despite the piles of corpses, that the mafia itself never existed. But he does everything without dramatizing or, better, dramatizing so much that there is nothing left but to laugh . All so real that it seems only grotesque. All so excessive that it would be said to be extracted from any and vulgar news. Barbarism was this.

And now there is only the prize list with a favorite that before the amount of memorable films seems almost and only a bet: Ema , by Pablo Larráin.

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