Leaving Locarno

We bid ciao with a Radu Jude review, Animal Interview, and some Piazza Grande pizazz

I first heard of the word Locarno from a moderately popular band that went to my school; I wonder why they choose this Ticinese city as the topic of their most successful song. Perhaps, as they performed this song in private for me and our friends a few years below, it was a prophecy from the future; one day you too will be in Locarno-whoa-whoa-whoa.

Anyway…

The festival finally comes to an end. I can’t say, observing from abroad, missing out on so-called masterpieces like Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World or The Human Surge 3, it’s been a vintage year, nonetheless, there are plenty of fascinating films to dig into and promote on this week’s newsletter. Let’s bid ciao with some of Journey Into Cinema’s latest writing.

Jared Abbott Interviews Sofia Exarchou About Animal

In my review of Animal (Sofia Exarchou, 2023), my favourite film of the year, I wrote that it “isn’t so much class critique as character study.” I thought so as we never see her interact with the rest of the staff at the hotel, much less management. Yet, according to the filmmaker, that intentional choice was very much meant to show how people suffer under anonymous capitalist systems. Rather than clutching my initial point, Jared’s incisive interview made me appreciate this excellent film in a new way…

“Animal is a film about performance — about these animateurs putting on a smile and entertaining people no matter what they’re feeling inside. What made you want to explore this specific group of resort workers?

Actually, I didn’t start out with the animateurs — I first started thinking about the tourist system and how I wanted to make a film about working systems under capitalism. Tourism is the cornerstone of the Greek economy and I see how the tourism machine plays out every year on the islands. I wanted to comment on people working under those harsh conditions.  I also wanted to explore entertainment and how this concept is so important in capitalism — how you have to entertain people all the time. I also felt quite related to it because of my job as a filmmaker and I was thinking about what it means to make people enjoy something and stuff. For me, any kind of worker has to put on a costume every day — they have to deliver for however many hours every day, and maybe smile for the CEO or the client or whatever. We actually put on a specific costume and smile like clowns. We have to deliver the energy, sometimes through dancing and singing, but for me, in the end, it’s always about workers entertaining people.”

Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema!

The new Radu Jude, reviewed by Joseph Owen

Radu Jude’s punky, itinerant new film makes good on its title: there’s little in the way of hope or yearning. 

We follow a day in the life of Angela (Ilinca Manolache), a production assistant for a video company, as she drives around Bucharest and its hinterlands, combining family chores with a punishing work schedule. She spends long hours visiting, interviewing and recording testimonies from people who’ve been disabled in the workplace — but for the benefit of the murky and nefarious Austrian firm that employed them. (Nina Hoss fills in as the arch, dispassionate marketing director.) The title’s helpful admission that they’re unlikely to be saved, much less redeemed, provides a kind of sanguine clarity. The apocalypse is coming. Don’t lament the bang; celebrate the whimpers you made along the way. 

Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema.

Critical Zone Fails to Hold Interest

Part car simulator game, part stoner comedy, part arthouse riff on the troubled masculinities and loneliness at the heart of Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976), the strange Iranian film Critical Zone (Ali Ahmadzadeh, 2023) takes us in and out of the Iranian underworld; showing us its outsiders, reprobates, hangers-on, losers, drug dealers and smugglers, prostitutes and addicts. Unconcerned with polemic or plot, it’s a slow, hazy exploration of Tehran’s seedier side that is as sleep-inducing as smoking hashish itself.

Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema.

First Case Cross-Examines Coming-of-Age

One of the basic tenets of French cinema, is that basically all adult characters, no matter their age, profession, race or background, are so inevitably — tragically — horny that their urgent — life-or-death! — desire to conduct an inappropriate affair, the type that goes against all basic legal and moral ethics, will undoubtedly colour their judgement and potentially ruin their entire life, yet with no doubt in their own mind that what they are doing is certainly wrong, they will plow on regardless, both literally and metaphorically.

You have to hand it to French cinema in this case: which other nation is so insanely committed to investigating, interrogating and exhausting the very human foibles of physical attraction? Certainly not any of the Anglo-Saxons. 

Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema.

Go With the Sensual Flow of On The Go

On The Go (Julia de Castro, María Gisele Royo, 2023) just starts.

No faffing about, no backstory, no set-up. Jonathan (Omar Ayuso) sets fire to a bar run by a dodgy pervert and jumps in the ‘67 Corvair of his best friend Milagros (Julia de Castro). Accompanied by an Asian woman named La Reina De Triana (Chacha Huang), who claims to be a mermaid, they head into the wilderness. Sex, sunshine and self-discovery await. 

Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema.

Stepne Ploddingly Trudges Through Ukraine’s Tragic Past

A Marshrutka (share taxi) winds slowly through a dark landscape, covered in snow and mud, filled with quiet passengers. Our hero, Anatoliy (Oleksandr Maksiakov), a middle-aged, taciturn, balding man, gets out. But there’s a long way to walk yet. It feels like a long way for the audience too, Stepne (Maryna Vroda, 2023) taking its sweet time to tell what, at its essence, is a very simple story. 

Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema.

All The Fires Flickers Weakly

“Some men just want to watch the world burn” — Alfred, The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008) 

The Mexican film All The Fires (Mauricio Calderón Rico, 2023) certainly lives up to its name. You see all types of burning things: cigarettes, matches, footballs, even hands. Fire and its dangerous effects — the way it flickers, spreads, consumes — is a key metaphor throughout Calderón Rico’s debut feature; it’s animating force, its source of creation. 

Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema.