Monday's was at the Mostra a day of the old ones, of the Cold War.
And not so much because it started to rain, that also, and with the rain came the strangeness of the almost freezing and the water everywhere, as because of the staging of the day.
Both '
Dear Comrades!
'(Dear comrades), by the Russian
Andrei Konchalovsky,
like'
One night in Miami
', by the American
Regina King
, the two films traveled to the 60s with the always serious attitude and manners of the stories from before that, by dint of insisting on the archetype, end up being the same as always.
In the
borgiana
category
Of the four cycles or the stories that summarize all possible stories, both would perhaps enter the last one, that of the sacrifice of a god ("... Attis, in Phrygia, is mutilated and killed; Odin, sacrificing Odin, He Himself to Himself, hangs from the tree for nine whole nights and is hit by the spear; Christ is crucified by the Romans ").
And so.
The most anticipated, without a doubt, was Regina King's.
She is the protagonist of the television series
that with the clarity of the offensive has best portrayed the current racial conflict in the United States.
We are talking about '
Wachtmen
', Damon Lindelof's meta-reading of the Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons metacomic.
The film based on a play by
Kemp Powers
(who is also a screenwriter) imagines the meeting of
Malcolm X, Sam Cooke, Jim Brown and Cassius Clay on
the night of 1964 in which the latter beat Sonny Liston on the ring.
They, each one from their sphere and their doubts, dream aloud and each one of their words seems like
a provocation,
seen after
George Floyd's
death
.
We are (or are) at the same point.
The director who debuts in the feature film opts for the simplest, cleanest and, if you like, conservative path.
And this, far from being criticized, is soon discovered as the main value of a film that wants to show the wound, but without burdensome didactics or too obvious proclamations.
The strategy consists in that the four legends are exhibited before the audience as what they are, almost gods,
until reaching the simple and neat moment of the myth
.
The sacrifice that would define the essence of the archetype in the 'borgian' classification comes later, after the poster that closes the film giving news of the murder shortly after Malcolm.
Andrei Konchalovsky and Julia Vysotskaya at the presentation of 'Dear comrades'. EFE
Everything takes place inside a hotel room with just a few well-calculated jumps back.
Each of the characters enacts a position: the violence claimed by one;
the commitment exhibited by another;
the will to resist of the third, or the right to live well, like a target, won by the last.
What is debated is not so much the need and opportunity of what is fair, as its urgency.
And that is where a film localized more than half a century ago does the most damage.
Transparency, cold as the day itself, is the virtue of '
One night in Miami
'.
Stalin in memory
At his side, the most relevant movie of the day and probably many others.
Konchalovsky is certainly up for the jackpot.
'
Dear Comrades!
'is in the words of its director a tribute to his parents' generation.
Those who believed in Stalin despite Stalin himself
.
What happened in June 1962 is narrated in a place by force lost that responds to the name of Novocherkassk.
And that it was nothing more than a massacre perpetrated by an eternally dying regime.
In the self-styled workers' paradise, the workers went on strike and the paradox resulted in the most obvious and fatal of contradictions: death.
The Russian master places the viewer in a place that is as uncomfortable as it is deeply honest.
The film progresses hand in hand with the most grim of the characters.
Or one of them.
Julia Vysotskaya
masterfully plays the role of a party official who has turned corruption, nostalgia for the great father (we are in the time of Nikita Khrushchev) and simple survival in the cardinal points of a necessarily cruel existence.
When her daughter disappears after the massacre perpetrated by the KGB, everything will take on a new life.
Or, better, the same old death.
'Dear Comrades!'
it runs across the screen like Pakula's movies.
The procedure matters, the rigor of an investigation
in which the viewer discovers exactly the same as the characters.
The screen tightens with the dark voice of the worst omens and the sense of rhythm, always fatal, that the director prints on a rigorous black and white stage that
sounds like an abyssal cantata.
The gods sacrificed, to return to Borges, are not so much each of the victims separately as the very ideal of a better world transformed into a simple hell.
In reality, both King effectively and masterfully Konchalovsky both hit on to x-ray the past as if it did not exist.
Indeed, and with
Faulkner
, the past is the present.
Finally, and to complete the competition section, the Polish director
Magorzata Szumowska and the director of photography Micha Englert
(the two sign the film) presented '
Never Gonna Snow Again
' (It will never snow again).
The record has nothing to do with the two previous films and, the truth, with few before.
The idea is to build an ecological fable between fantastic and only unreal.
A masseuse sneaks into a properly and obscenely rich suburban development.
Being the son of Chernobyl turns the demigod also into
a radioactive angel
willing to cure any evil of an incurable society.
As clearly in her previous work ('
The other lamb')
and less obviously in much of her filmography, the director entertains herself in constructing metaphors
as suggestive and provocative as, let's face it, only arbitrary.
Along with unquestionable visual findings, the film piles up ideas, suggestions, parodies and simple occurrences beyond the shame.
Either way, the supposedly deep movie bass tone doesn't help.
And so a cold, spherical sacrificial day was completed.
When it rains in Venice, everything is water.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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