Awards and balance of International Film Festival of Uruguay

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – There were over 60 feature and several short films from countries in all continents at the 2021 Cinemateca festival, which ended on Sunday.

Following a film festival is like touring a city in a limited and insufficient amount of time: the city is offered in its entirety, but each traveler will see only the partial aspects found in their particular journey.

Together with Soledad Castro Lazaroff and Nicolás Medina, I was part of the jury of the Uruguayan Film Critics Association for the International Competition.

This forced me to watch the 12 films in this competition and left me no room for anything else. It was a particularly enjoyable and enriching panorama of recent film production that is not part of the more commercial circuit. The following is a summary of films to keep in mind (it is very likely that some of them will be released in Uruguay in the coming months).

THE WINNERS

The jury awarded “À plein temps,” by French Éric Gravel, as best film. The film describes a few days in the life of a working woman, a single mother of two young children, who lives in a quiet village on the outskirts of Paris, but works in the capital as head maid at a five-star hotel.

To get to work on time, she must wake up before sunrise, returning almost at bedtime. Her routine includes preparing breakfast for the family, leaving the children at the nanny’s house who takes care of them during the day, taking a full range of means of transportation (train, bus, subway, walking) to get to work, attending to some other details of her life before taking the long way back.

This routine is shown repeatedly in the film, which covers more or less a week. It is not only tedium and fatigue: it is also urban neurosis and the stress of arriving on time and accomplishing everything, while some crucial aspects are at stake: at work she is repeatedly cautioned by her many delays, the old nanny is irritated because she picks up the kids past her time, and to top it all she is competing for a more qualified job.

The film’s editing is of unprecedented virtuosity and each day is shown as a variation of the same cycle. Everything that films usually simply dwell on in ellipsis because it is narratively insignificant (going from one place to another, performing daily chores) is emphasized here, as if to account for the daily burden of a working woman who, as is often the case, is also responsible for her children.

Her situation is aggravated by a Europe in crisis and the anguish faced with the specter of unemployment: a daily experience of fear, urgency, loneliness, responsibility, humiliation, uncertainty, plagued by little lies here and there to escape the consequences as best as possible.

Once we become fully involved with the main character (a terrific performance by Laure Calamy), each of her races to reach one destination or another is a moment of suspense and tension that leaves the audience gripped to the edge of their seats: the thriller of domestic life.

The film depicts particularly complicated circumstances: there are work stoppages compromising the general functioning of Paris, including transportation; the children’s father is away on a trip. But this exaggeration – which does not go beyond a naturalistic, plausible framework – contributes to highlighting other implications, referring to alienated labor and the characteristics that capitalist society has been taking on in countries that we associate with relative well-being.

The hotel maid’s job emphasizes some of these aspects: the ideal maid should be invisible to the guests, as far as possible, an excellent synecdoche for the role of workers in cinema, who are usually mere accessories in stories that concern other people. The final scene is sensational, moving, ambiguous.

Our special mention went to Romanian director Eugen Jebeleanu’s Poppy Field. The official jury’s best director award went to another Romanian film, Radu Jude’s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn.

The official jury of this competition (Argentines Fernando E Juan Lima and Clara Picasso and Uruguayan Guillermo Casanova) awarded Best Film to the Spanish film Who’s Stopping Us, by Jonás Trueba. In this almost 4-hour documentary, the director followed the lives of a group of teenagers from the age of 15 to 19 or 20, in the midst of the pandemic. Different techniques are intermingled.

There are videoconference shots of the grown-up boys and girls, chatting among themselves and with the director, and sometimes commenting on scenes filmed years ago. There are documentary records. There are also others that look like documentaries but cannot be, because they show very intimate moments alternating shots and close-ups.

We must assume that they are reconstructions, or even fictitious episodes. The audience’s uncertainty becomes part of the film’s aesthetic experience.

On the other hand, this uncertainty is only possible due to the incredible ease of performances, so one guesses that this production had a great amount of creative and interpretative workshop, and must have been tremendously enriching.

There is also the background, which is a portrait of the generation, through diverse instances: gatherings with alcohol, drugs and flirtations of love and sex; protests against cuts in public education; adolescent anxieties, anxieties in the socialization process; the forming of a couple and the loss of virginity; vocational orientations; different personalities; conceptual discussions; the practice of pop music as a hobby; expectations for a future that is no longer part of the film.

One wonders how much of today’s Madrid youth and of Jonás Trueba is present in this scenario, because the spirit is totally Trueba-esque: sensitive, cool, intelligent people without being arrogant or losing their curiosity, relaxed and without severe economic or social issues.

THE OTHER EIGHT

There wasn’t a single title that didn’t contribute something. In my opinion, the poorest was Night of the Kings (Philippe Lacôte, Ivory Coast), which takes place in a high-security prison, but even if it has unresolved or banal aspects, it implies a positive contact with sub-Saharan cinematography, including magical and folkloric elements in the line of Malian Souleymane Cissé.

Ahed’s Knee (Nadav Lapid, Israel) may seem half-pretentious and dated in its recourse to portraying the creative crisis of a film director, who one guesses is an alter ego of the film’s author. There are references to the Israeli government’s crushing of the most critical artists. However, the style is very striking and original, and worth watching.

Ripples of Life (Wei Shujun, China) is also meta-cinema: it consists of three episodes at different stages of the preparation for the shooting of a film in the small town of Yong’an. Each episode is centered on a character. The first two are particularly poignant and could have formed a self-contained diptych. One story focuses on a woman who aspires to stardom and the other on an actress who longs for the simple life, while we, the omniscient viewers, note with disenchantment the vanity of both pretensions.

Social Hygiene (Denis Côté, Canada) is a parametric construction, meaning that the main focus of interest is in accompanying the small variations in a set of formal possibilities completely out of the ordinary, adorned with an intriguing and half-absurd diegetic framework, and with some enjoyable clever lines. For those who want to get into the game and find the twist, it’s a unique experience.

Undine (Christian Petzold, Germany) is a love story dotted with magical elements, and there is some room for doubt as to whether the film constructed a supernatural universe or if it is all imaginings and allegories. Confronted with the coquetry of incredible images, one can sense the stylistic gloating coupled with an eagerness for cheap poeticism characteristic of Luc Besson, Kim Ki-duk or M Night Shyamalan. But Petzold, the most prestigious German director of the moment, is much more refined and discreet than any of the above.

Here I Laugh (Mario Martone, Italy) is a biopic of the Neapolitan comic actor Eduardo Scarpetta (1853-1925), focusing on his 1904 dispute with Gabriele D’Annunzio. It is a very rich story, which depicts a decisive step in the process of aesthetic disciplining: high culture and Art with a capital letter against popular culture, transcendent earnestness versus comedy, hegemonic Italianity against regional culture, the institution of copyright repressing parodic anthropophagy.

Concurrently, there is a particularly vivid portrait of a patriarchal, authoritarian figure, living in virtual polygamy and with a myriad of legitimate and so-called illegitimate children. It is a formidable portrait of the culture of the time. The great Toni Servillo shines once again in the leading role.

Anais in Love (Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet, France) portrays a young woman with a special personality – hyperactive, dispersed, persistent and tireless when it comes to getting what she wants, but totally irresponsible with respect to others.

At one point she falls in love with a famous writer much older than herself and sets out to seduce her. It’s always a breath of fresh air to watch a French film made for an audience highly educated in humanities, for whom surnames like Robbe-Grillet or Duras have meaning. The ending is surprising.

The Salt of Tears (France). For years, veteran Philippe Garrel has been making black-and-white films about the whims and amorous vagaries of young characters, with much of the Nouvelle Vague, especially Éric Rohmer. As always, he is delicate, sensitive, attentive to the unpredictability of life, somewhat disenchanted.

THE FESTIVAL AWARDS

International Feature Film Competition
Official Jury. Best film: Who’s Stopping Us (Jonás Trueba, Spain). Best Direction: Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (Radu Jude, Romania).

Jury of the Uruguayan Film Critics Association. Best film: À plein temps (Éric Gravel, France). Mention: Poppy Field (Eugen Jebeleanu, Romania).

Iberoamerican Feature Film Competition
Official Jury. Best Film: The Other Tom (Laura Santullo and Rodrigo Plá, Mexico).

Jury of the Uruguayan Film Critics Association. Best Film: Visions of Empire (Joana Pontes, Portugal).

New Directors: Wood and Water (Jonas Bak, Germany/France/Hong Kong).

Uruguayan Short Films: Tejedoras (Agustina Willat and Ana Micenmacher).

International Short Films: Clean with Me (After Dark) (Gabrielle Stemmer, France).

By Guilherme de Alencar Pinto