Abel Ferrara or suicide as the most beautiful of fine arts

At one point in Sportin 'Life, a clueless journalist asks Abel Ferrara about the meaning of the word "radical."

He, an expert in shaking off questions like other flies, goes to chess.

"Bobby Fisher was not aware of the mechanisms of his thought or psychology, he was only concerned with the next move," he says.

And on that confusing castling, between the spasm and the self-help manual, the Bronx filmmaker builds a perfectly ordered documentary in its most intimate chaos.

Silent and at the same time thunderous.

Illuminated.

Elements as anomalous and vital as urgency, risk, anger, travel or amazement are the pieces that make up

a film that, in the words of the director, "is a documentary about how documentaries are made";

a story about the very impossibility of all stories;

.

That or, it is fair to admit it, quite the opposite.

To situate ourselves, the film, which also served for its director to collect the

for his entire career, uses as its plot the filming of another film itself, which is never clear whether it is, as he says, documentary or simple documentary imposture.

Cinema that devours cinema.

The passage of the Ferrara troupe (actors, technicians, family,

and daughter) through the last Berlin Festival where it presented Siberia, perhaps the most vocationally cryptic, dark and provocative work of the head of corrupt Lieutenant is recorded.

On that dominance, the film inserts variations that are instants of past films, recent images of the confinement in Rome, statements out of tune by Donald Trump and

all of him.

"What happens in the most remote region of the planet affects us all from now on," it is heard.

Everything flows as if it were the current of consciousness of the author himself who acts at the same time as director, protagonist, muse of himself, monster of the fair and prophet.

The audience, far from feeling invited to be part of the party (or whatever), is directly exposed to a mechanism designed to enter the viewer's head.

Ferrara says that he is not so interested in the plot as in the internal rhythm of what he films.

says the professor to throw off the vice of narration, not pedantry.

He is only interested, he insists, in getting lost.

affirms sententiously and Willem Dafoe, by his side, cannot help but laugh at such wisdom.

The last scenes of the pandemic parade across the screen in an enraged poem, and they do so while someone on the other side of the screen struggles to register something with a minimum of meaning.

But there is no way.

and exhibits them as others show the scars of wars forcibly lost.

They talk about what happened a long time ago and now it has us where we are, but in reality what matters is the need to rebuild, to retell ourselves, to reach the grace of rhythm.

Only the rhythm matters.

Ferrara sings, gets irritated, yawns, declaims, and faints.

Ferrara is a strange being in which each and every one of our contradictions converge and break.

The film has something of a prophetic testament that reminds us of

(

) with the same force and clarity as that pile of unfinished and impossible films that

dreamed of

in

It is necessarily twilight cinema that claims for itself the virtue of the unknown, the strange, the radical again.

It is cinema that, as Abel Ferrara himself says, is recomposed with each play.

It is a useless genius so unaware of its power for the revolution that it seems the most naive of provocations;

a suicide to continue living.

Vanessa Kirby at the presentation of 'Pieces of a woman'.EFE

WOMEN TO COUNT

For the rest, the official competition section made an appearance under the old and always renewed motto of

You know: "Women have served for centuries as mirrors endowed with the magical and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man doubling its natural size."

A woman who watches her child die just after giving birth and another who falls victim to the despair of being a woman in a man's world were the two arguments that guided the films submitted to competition.

And it is not so much feminism, that also, as the something more than urgent need to count that part of the world yet to be discovered.

On the one hand, the Italian

presented '

on the other, the Hungarian

did the same with

The first, the most anticipated, ended in disappointment.

After all, we owe its director another passionate and brilliant portrait of another harassed woman, 'Nico, 1988'.

The film wants to tell the story of Eleonor Marx, daughter of Karl, and a capital figure (indeed) both in the labor movement and in the emancipation of women.

The strategy followed by the director consists of transferring the nerve and vibration of what a contemporary narrative wants to be to a vintage film.

Or just modern.

To do this, it is played to subvert the rules of the most classic melodrama until it approaches what could be described as dirty or just nervous realism.

Everything runs academically slowly, but under (or over) the violent chords of a punk soundtrack.

Marx, the woman who was not the father, committed suicide before the obligation to be someone who did not want to be.

The kind contempt of the mediocre (all men) that Eleonor's clear and powerful mind suffered in her time is too much like the condescending and paternalistic contempt of today.

We have not advanced.

Or not so much.

The case of Mundruczco is different.

Now the problem, which remains, is that the film fails to live up to its first masterful 20 minutes.

Few scenes so broken, so alive, so close to the viewer as that of the most tragic of childbirth.

What follows seems as energetically shot as it is arbitrary and erratic.

Mundruczco also lets himself be carried away by another mannerism: that of his brilliant, immersive and physical style.

and for much of the film the viewer's gaze is subjected to an almost magical principle of mesmerism.

However, the desire to show off in each shot neglects even parody a story that is only there to get lost in the depths of the obvious, the sad, the corny perhaps.

Pity.

THE DUPIEUX FLY

Be that as it may, it was a really troubled day.

Uneven yes, but irresistible.

By anarchic and even vocationally suicidal.

If to all this we add the proverbial example of terrifying surrealism by the best

imaginable, everything begins to add up.

How to explain what is

and who responds to the name

?

Answer: something very crazy, something very Dupieux.

Perfectly crazy and perfectly Dupieux.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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