While it may be the least looked-at European festival out of the big four (Cannes, Berlinale, Venice), the Locarno is a fascinating film festival. It gives most of its program spaces to emerging or lesser-known filmmakers and those curious to experiment with their style and craft. Many films are playing at this year’s Locarno that felt ingenious and had their own sense of exploration. In this capsule review piece, I will talk about three of them that I felt had a vibrant eye in terms of directorial singularity– two from the Concorso Internazionale (Bogancloch, Transamazonia) and the other from Fuori Concorso (Dragon Dilatation). Some of them worked better than others. But ultimately, there is plenty to take away from them.
Bogancloch (Directed by. Ben Rivers)
The first film in this capsule review piece from Locarno is experimental filmmaker Ben Rivers’ latest documentary, Boganloch (screening at the Concorso Internazionale). For the past few years, Rivers has been documenting the life of a man named Jake Williams. Rivers describes him as a man with a different sense of time, living alone in the Abudeshire forest in Scotland. Beginning with This is My Land in 2007, Rivers made a fly-on-the-wall, fragmentary piece on this fascinating person that captured his life daily. You started to ponder about his mental state after all of this time being isolated. Williams is an expert Mandolin player, and he has plans for creating hedges with bird feeders, as well as other things he has in mind with the objects he never throws away.
After various shorts and documentaries on him, Rivers again turns to Jake Williams for inspiration and further explores his life in Bogancloch. Twelve years after not knowing where the man in the woods has been, we are back in his life–seeing what has changed and stayed the same, literally and figuratively. This film’s title is taken from the name of the forest in which Williams resides, lying deep in the Scottish Highlands in a remote cottage he has constructed with his bare hands. Bogancloch covers more ground than Rivers’ previous works as it covers more than a few days of his life. This time, we see the seasons change. The sun lights his made-shift residence, and snow covers the roof like a white quilt.
No matter the weather, Williams is prepared for everything. Williams is a man who embraces nature, both in its beauty and hardships. He does not try to control or dominate it to his favor regarding the living situation. Instead, Williams succumbs to it, as if he wants to live in symbiosis with the flora and fauna surrounding him. It is fascinating to see how he prepares for each change in the climate and does his daily activities accordingly. And Rivers’ camera and vision remain humanistic throughout the film’s entirety. Other filmmakers might want to tether the fine line of intrigue and exploitation by dwelling on poverty porn and miserabilism. But Rivers respects his subject too much to do that. He remains empathetic through his realism, respecting Williams’ views and values.
What draws Bogancloch back is its repetitiveness and lack of analysis during its first half. Although it is a different scenario than before, the structure and format feel similar to what Rivers has done previously with Williams. To warrant its runtime, it must do more to separate itself from these projects. The last twenty minutes dictate the reasoning for this project and why we are back to the Scottish lands. In these minutes, Rivers, with the help of Williams, explores the ever-changing world compared to the subject’s view and perception of time. Bogancloch is still a very intriguing and experimental project worth dissecting. But if you have delved into its 2011 predecessor, Two Years at Sea, there isn’t much left.
Grade: C+
Dragon Dilatation (Directed by. Bertrand Mandico)
The second film in this capsule review piece is the latest experiment by French iconoclast Bertrand Mandico, who has presented an artistic dual filmic essay that is as flashy as it is metatextual and provocative, Dragon Dilatation (screening on the Fuori Concorso section of the festival). A usual at Locarno, Mandico has shocked attendees for years now; he has shown his queer versions of sci-fi westerns (After Blue) and Conan the Barbarian (She is Conann) previously. Now, he is back with something way different, an artistic expression of two writings–’Petrouchka’ and ‘La Déviante Comédie’–through his erotic and poetic lens. It is a project that exalts personality and originality while, at the same time, calling back to his previous material.
Divided into two sections, with the split screen format Gaspar Noé recently used in his films Lux Æterna and Vortex to give the film a hypnotic effect, Dragon Dilatation covers these essays concurrently. Mandico plays both of them to place the idea that we are traveling through a gyre of his weirdest creations, incorporating the techniques he has acquired through his many years as a director, from Loving Still Life to The Wild Boys. On one side, you see ‘Petrouchka’, a re-reading of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet of the same name. This is originally the story of the lives of three puppets and how love and jealousy devour them as they are brought to life.
On the other side of the screen, there’s ‘La Déviante Comédie’, which can be seen as Mandico’s rendition of “The Divine Comedy”, but with his knack of adding eroticism to each corporal gesture. This segment is constructed with sequences from an unpublished performance rehearsed at the Théâtre des Amandiers. Each movement, whether from the ballet or the exhibition at the French theater, has this angst and liberation to them, just like Rainer (Elina Löwenson) encourages the characters in ‘La Déviante Comédie’ to experience so they can reach a level of ecstasy that will “cure” them. The scenarios in which the characters embark are haphazard and treacherous. Yet they thrive for pleasure, and euphoria fuels their souls and guides them.
Most of Mandico’s films cover these grounds. He tends to make stories that tether between bliss and violence so that the protagonists in them can end their respective journeys with an understanding that there isn’t love or pleasure without suffering. Mandico makes their ventures like an emotional vortex that leads to a rhapsody of seven heavens, at least depending on the respective characters’ version of such. Dragon Dilatation is ambiguous and provocative, like all of Mandico’s works. But what I like most about him is how he captures society’s tendency to put labels on people’s bodies through creative and imaginative dark imagery.
Grade: B+
Transamazonia (Directed by. Pia Marais)
The third (and final) film in this capsule review piece is Pia Marais’ first film in over a decade, Transamazonia (screening at the Concorso Internazionale). It was back in 2013 when we last saw Marais directing a film with Layla Fourie, a story about a single mother in South Africa who becomes a part of a genre of lies amidst accepting a job as a polygraphist. It centered around a society dealing with its dark past. Her latest work has some thematic connection, as Transamazonia also deals with the ghosts of the dark past and the lines that cover them up in camouflage. Transamazonia’s main narrative gadget is a plane crash in which a young girl named Rebecca survived.
Her survival is deemed a miracle, a blessing from the gods who saved the youngling. Nine years later, we flash forward to Rebecca (now played by Helena Zengel) and her U.S. missionary father, Lawrence (Jeremy Xido), finding themselves at the center of a small community near where the plane crashed. Rebecca is seen as an essential figure to the villagers, serving as an acclaimed “spiritual healer” who can cure their mental or illness-related woes. Their lives seem to be filled with a lie or a misconception tampered with by Lawrence, who takes advantage of this scenario. This relationship between Lawrence and the villagers he’s evangelizing fractures when loggers invade their safe place.
Their evangelical acts are now presented in a bigger spotlight, showing flaws and intrusiveness. Pia Marias uses the miracle of surviving a plane crash and taking advantage of the miraculous situation as a way to talk about bigotry and vehemence in religion. But, due to the Amazonic setting, many other themes, like colonization and deforestation, come to fruition. In terms of visual language, made possible by cinematographer Mathieu de Montgrand, it is seen through a mystifying eye, where nature and religion clash to get Transamazonia and its atmosphere further from a grounded state. An example of this is Rebecca’s nightmares throughout the film. Ants eat and cover up her body to reflect the ever-consuming feeling of deceit from religious zeal.
While all of this sounds fascinating and is vast imagery-wise, many holes in the screenplay impede Parais from further commenting on the aforementioned themes. Parais immerses you in this journey as her directorial eye focuses on the beauty and destruction of her character’s mental state and the nature surrounding them. Yet, as she crosses into the fractured nature of their relationships and how they tie to deforestation and religion, Parais does not know how to tie the knots. It takes you out of the mythical experience she is building at the forefront of this story. Transamazonia is still a fascinating project with a unique vision that captivates the viewer from a visual standpoint and through the performances and use of sound. Unfortunately, the project is held down by a weak script.
Grade: C
