ToxicLocarno in a Holding Pattern While Redressing the Riven Social Fabric Jaimey Fisher November 2024 Festival Reports Issue 111 Much of the news before and after the Locarno Film Festival this year concerned the appointment of a new president of the festival, Maja Hoffmann, after some 23 years with Marco Solari at the festival helm. The president of a film festival typically has little to do, at least directly, with the films selected – such selection usually falls under the purview of the artistic director and programming teams. But presidents nonetheless have essential influence on the basic shape, everyday operations, and long-term institutional health of the event. Solari has been widely credited with raising the profile of Locarno with the serial appointments of effective artistic directors while also steering the festival to continued growth – with growth not at all a given in such a small town within a small country like Switzerland. His background in both local Ticino tourism as well as with large corporate entities like Switzerland’s Federation of Co-operatives Migros prepared him exceptionally for the odd range of hats that a festival president has to wear, with cultural, tourist, and operational expertise all relevant. Many were very keenly curious about who would succeed Solari, someone who had come to embody the likeable, low-key cosmopolitanism of Locarno. The festival’s choice of Hoffmann in 2023 made her the first female president of the storied festival who also happens to be, as was widely reported and discussed, a billionaire heiress from one of Switzerland’s richest families, the Hoffmann-Roches (as in: Roche Pharmaceuticals). An active philanthropist in a long line of philanthropists – her father Luc co-founded the World Wildlife Foundation – Hoffmann has been an important patron of the arts, and collector of contemporary art, especially in Arles, in southern France, the erstwhile home of Vincent van Gogh. Although she has hitherto mostly been known for her work in the art world, especially via the LUMA foundation she created in 2004, she also studied film in New York and has produced documentary films. In the run up to the festival, and in its wake, she emphasized that this year her focus would be on getting to know the festival, its strengths and challenges, and she kept mostly a low profile throughout, leaving open the question of any reforms or initiatives she might undertake. For example, Locarno’s international competition, while offering some excellent films, extends the festival’s streak of modestly-budgeted art cinema with promising young talent, frequently offering either their debut or early-career work. Neither the competition nor the festival’s more popularly minded Piazza Grande section galvanized much buzz or broke remarkable new ground, leaving the festival in a bit of a holding pattern while Hoffmann decides on alterations or initiatives. This festival’s top prize, its Golden Leopard, went this year to Saule Biluvaite’s Akiplėša (Toxic), about two 13-year-old girls, Marija (Vesta Matulytė) and Kristina (Ieva Rupeikaitė), who become unlikely friends and would-be models in a dilapidated industrial town in Lithuania. The film deploys the youth-panic genre – the shocking delinquency, the moody music, and the mini-masculinist thugs certainly recall HBO’s Euphoria (Sam Levinson, 2019-2022) – in unusually effective and highly skilled ways to conjure a rundown world that the girls understandably want to escape. The girls’ ages and the extremes to which they go to realize their modelling dreams provide the tensions amid the film’s appealingly loose, episodic approach. Most of the disturbed attention at the festival went to the tapeworm that Kristina imbibes to keep her weight down for an expensive modelling regimen, but the film highlights throughout the disciplining of young female bodies in a society with few active guardians or any effective guardrails. Both girls live in households with distracted and/or disengaged parents: Marija’s mother left her with her grandmother (telling her daughter there is no room for her wherever she landed), while Kristina’s laughably detached father Sarunas (Giedrius Savickas) is supportive but distracted by car, darts, and his smalltown assignations. The danger in such an approach is, of course, the perils of “poverty porn,” that is, of shocking viewers with the depths of provincial boredom and small-town bleakness. For example, the setting is the kind of Eastern-European town where the predominant architecture seems to be converted shipping containers, one of which holds the modelling school where an unscrupulous modelling madame encourages the girls while pocketing their families’ limited funds. Nonetheless, the film offers photographically fascinating depictions of its milieu while probing both the pleasures and perils of small-town life. Drowning Dry While Toxic walked away with the Golden Leopard, another Lithuanian film, Seses (“Sisters” but released as Drowning Dry, Laurynas Bareiša), was arguably just as decorated, with the competition’s director and performance awards – in fact, shortly after the festival, Seses was picked as Lithuania’s Oscar submission for the year. Seses opens with a professional, mixed-martial arts fight in which one of the four adult principals, Lukas (Paulius Markevicius), pummels his opponent into submission. In the locker room shortly thereafter, however, Ernesta (Gelmine Glemzaite), his wife and mother to their son, tells him, crying, that she wishes someone would “beat the shit out of him” so he would stop fighting. Besides grabbing our attention, and piquing our disquiet, this prologue encapsulates the masculinist perils within families and the way spouses and children cope with them. The second-act action then unfolds at a summer house where this fighting family vacations with Ernesta’s sister, Juste (Agne Kaktaite), her husband Tomas (Giedrius Kiela), and their daughter. Juste and Tomas’s family has its own version of masculinist attitudes despite a prominent paunch on Tomas that contrasts with the toned, tattooed body of Lukas: Tomas seems committed to an enormous pickup trick with absurd horsepower and making money to conspicuously consume in this mode. To Bareiša’s credit, however, this brand of toxic masculinity is played with complexity, even with some perplexed sympathy, even as the film mocks it – as in the films of Derek Cianfrance or early Christian Petzold, there is an understanding of how men are confused by their physicality and the premium put on it by the wider culture, even if the films then unfold the perils in the wake of it. Those perils become very clear as the families deal with a series of shocking tragedies and its familial fallout that makes a kind of maze of the third act, but always in intriguing ways. Moon A different kind of community emerges In Mond (Moon), which took home the festival’s jury prize. Like Seses, Moon opens with a mixed martial arts match, with its sweaty grunting, graphic writhing, and subtending violence. Moon’s opening and only match, however, ends in a defeat for the protagonist, Sarah (Florentina Holzinger), who, the announcer informs us, is on the downside of her career. Here, as in Seses, the super fit, strong, and abruptly aggressive individual seems the perfect metaphor for our neoliberal times – scholars Donna Haraway and David Harvey have written about the contemporary body as a strategy of accumulation, but, of course, the problems emerge as the body ages out of the neoliberal rat race. Sarah’s downward career arc is confirmed by her subsequent search for jobs training of would-be martial artists in her native Austria. After some comically ineffectual lessons to lazy local Gen Z’ers, Sarah lands a month-long job in Amman, Jordan, training three sisters of a smooth-talking brother-in-patriarchal-waiting. The film plays this MMA fish-out-of-cultural-water for a few laughs – for example, in the drunken passes Sarah makes at the hotel bar in front of perplexed local staff – but things take a turn against toxic masculinity when Sarah finds out about a fourth sister who has been hidden away due to mental health problems and then learns from another sister about a plan to escape the well-fortified mansion and the controls it concretizes. The previous feature Sonne (Sun, 2022) by the Vienna-based, Iraq-born director Kurdwin Ayub showed in the Encounters section of the Berlinale and won a Best First Feature prize, and, while Sun explored the lives of Muslims in Austria, Moon also shows considerable skill in inverting, and complicating, the story of an Austrian in the Muslim world, in a vividly shot and acted film that has no real heroes or villains. Although it might seem telescoped onto a particular time and place – and microscopic in attention to the details of that time-place – Wang Bing’s Youth project is after something fundamental in human behaviour and societies. The abstract forces of economics, of markets and labour and workers’ communities, are famously difficult to depict in visual media – cue Bertolt Brecht’s famous quote about the inutility of a picture of the outside of a factory for comprehending the economic relations therein. But it is becoming increasingly clear that Wang Bing’s work, honoured at this year’s festival with a “Special Mention,” should count as one of the great statements on how people relate to work and the economy in the history of cinema. His work attends not only to how they relate to economy in general, but relate to it amid probably the greatest economic transition in a short time ever. Wang Bing went into the factories – here the small-ish, private sweatshops of Zhili near Shanghai in eastern China – and shows how these temporary, even improvised sweatshops function contradictorily: they operate often to the detriment of their workers even as they pay them more than they could hope to earn in their rural homelands. This film, Qing Chun (Ku) (Youth (Hard Times)) is the more economically detailed second part of a trilogy completed this year – Wang Bing shot the films between 2014-2019, with this second instalment shot primarily in 2015-16 and then edited over six months plus. The commitment of Wang Bing and his team to the project is astonishing – in a work about astoundingly difficult and long hours (most workdays for these textile workers going 8am until 11pm), the film team seems to match it with their commitment to documenting it all. This commitment and hard work on the part of the filmmakers result in truly astonishing stretches, including watching workers’ negotiations with slippery bosses as well as rare, candid political reflections on riots and labour unrest. Youth (Hard Times) The film runs more than three hours and forty minutes (227 minutes) and has an enormous range of ever-changing interview subjects, so it is hard to convey just how effective it is in documenting the character of this work and life in these sweatshops. French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre foregrounded what he termed the rhythmology of societies and particularly modern cities – the way that especially modern spaces and economic practices have changed time and its rhythms of life – and Wang Bing and his team offer an unforgettable rhythmanalysis of Zhili, where hundreds of thousands of workers migrate seasonably from faraway, rural provinces to churn out clothes for domestic and international markets. The various ages of those listed, from about 17 to about 45, highlight how these cycles go on for years and years for most workers, even as they transform the relationship among the generations due to migration and the pressures of the workplace. Among its many fundamental themes, the film foregrounds the relations of individuals to their own labour and, simultaneously, to labour at multiple scales, be it in their shop, under their boss, in the city, in China, etc. One stunning sequence documents the workers’ shock and disconsolation when they learn that their boss has simply fled with most of the shop’s money – apparently, a not unknown occurrence in these low regulation environments (Wang Bing said he had heard of hundreds of cases like this among Zhili’s 15,000+ shops). The boss apparently disappeared because he and henchman beat up a fabric supplier to whom they had owed monies. The now stranded workers try to sell the various sewing and textile machines, but viewers also discover how the most valuable equipment has already been stolen – and, in an incredible sequence, also watch as the landlord, likewise victimized by a fugitive boss, cuts the electricity in their dorm, forcing them out even before the end of the lease. One of the wronged workers observes: “And they say migrant labour has to be closely monitored!” It is a statement that also points to moments of levity, with worker solidarity and humour (and pride in the work) being some of the very modest recompense for the long hours and modestly paid work. Although it may not be fair to compare a film of this duration, scope, and scale to the other films in the competition, it certainly strikes as the most astounding feat in the section. Green Line Another incredibly effective, and generally astonishing, documentary won the newly created MUBI Award – First Feature. Focusing on the brutal Lebanese civil war between 1975 and 1990, Sylvie Ballyot’s Green Line was an interesting choice for the inaugural award because, although the film is nonfiction, it smartly tugs at the precedented parameters of documentary. Avoiding talking-head experts subjected to disembodied questions, Ballyot focuses on the experiences of one person, Fida Bizri, born in 1975 and thus a child throughout the war. Bizri offers painful personal reminiscences of her childhood as well as engaging in dialogue with individuals from (many) various parties to the war. But, most remarkably, these often gently confrontational conversations usually unfold as Bizri and her discussant manipulate miniature figurines positioned among cardboard buildings positioned on a map. These miniature figures – wobbly, colourful plastic for the living and supine grey clay for the dead – interact with the models’ architectural and cartographic spaces. These models help visualize the complexity of the situation, including the eponymous “green line” of the civil war that divided largely Muslim-controlled West Beirut from largely Christian-controlled East Beirut. The childlike miniatures also allow the interlocutors to recall memories in circuitous, disarming ways. Bizri insistently questions her various discussants about what motivated their violence and, most insistently, how they thought about children like her during it – although they all try to avoid details, it is clear that her discussants have all killed people (some likely many people) during the war. When Bizri asks for them to explain these killings to her younger self, their usual justifications and rationalizations stutter and stall, leaving them, in many astounding moments, as perplexed as viewers are – not least because the miniatures likely have brought them back in unexpected ways. Another of the competition’s honourable mentions went to Mar Coll’s Salve Maria. Coll’s title intones a sacred invocation, but its mundane application can become monstrous: Salve Maria unfolds the challenges of a successful author, Maria (Laura Weissmahr), who struggles with her first child and the challenges of young parenthood in southern Europe. The cramped quarters, flawed parental leave policies, and the fading of extended family support could all be grist for a realist mill, but Salve Maria turns quickly into an intense psychological portrait of Maria’s post-partum struggles and the emotional travails of having an infant and caring for it largely on her own. Maria becomes obsessed with a local French mother who has committed infanticide and begins to write an account of the murderer’s thought processes, which the author then suspiciously conceals from the baby’s father. Her writerly imagination increasingly takes over from the film’s realist trappings, veering into assorted horror and thriller tropes from the romanticized stations of early maternity. One of the most engaging sequences manages to merge a Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) apparitional chase with a kind of maternal body horror. Death Will Come In Christoph Hochhäusler’s gripping neo-noir, Death Will Come, the title promises – and the film delivers – the scepticism about contemporary society that the most compelling noirs unfold. Underpinned by this cultural pessimism, the open-ended question of this title is whose death, exactly, will arrive, and the film explores not only numerous individuals’ violent demise – there are plenty of those – but also the death of labour, and the labouring body, as they have been known since time immemorial. The film opens with aging and ill crime boss Charles Mahr (the expertly melancholic Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) receiving a demo from slimy Patric de Boer (a scene-stealing Marc Limpach) and his loud lawyer lover Julie Despontes (Hilde Van Miegheim). De Boer and Despontes are pitching Mahr a major investment in sex dolls and VR headsets to replace the traditional sex workers in which both crime groups traffic. Underlying historical transformations are also manifest in the competition between Mahr, de Boer, and a young contract killer whom Mahr hires, Tez (the excellent Sophie Verbeeck), whose precise physicality and piercing blue eyes recall Alain Delon in the Jean-Luc Melville films that Hochhäusler cites as a major influence. Her final target unknown, Tez floats unpredictably between Mahr and DeBoer/Despontes as well as a third crime syndicate headed by a blind former sex worker turned boss, Mela (Delphine Bibet) who might be the most dangerous of all. The transformations of the film manifest themselves in the increasing attention, and perspective, afforded Tez as she assesses the various parties and volleys between them – her free agency and flexibility itself registering the larger socio-economic transformations with which Hochhäusler entertainingly engages. Ramon Zürcher was the only Swiss filmmaker in Locarno’s competition with his Der Spatz im Kamin (The Sparrow in the Chimney) and is known for foregrounding animals in his films (and titles). The animals here, in and around the family house of two sisters, have it pretty rough, but perhaps not as rough as the family inhabiting the house: when a neighbour beheads a chicken in an early sequence and tosses it into their yard, splashing poultry blood on various visiting relatives, things become troubling. The impressive accomplishment of the brothers Zürcher is, however, that this decapitation sequence is played (contra Caché (Michael Haneke,2005) and its own memorable poultry slaughter) almost cheerfully. In fact, this neighbour turns out to be one of the story’s surprise heroes. Similarly surprising is how, although this family has grown shockingly dysfunctional over the years, the film somehow seems hopeful. The details of this dysfunction unfold under the world-weary but withering gaze of its mother figure, a devastating Karen (Maren Eggert). Perhaps best known internationally for the sci-fi comedy I’m your Man (2021), for which she won a Berlinale Bear for acting, Eggert has been a main stay of assorted Berlin School films, especially those by Angela Schanelec, as well as the phenomenally successful long-running German police drama, Tatort (1970 [!] – present). Eggert’s icy detachment from the circumstances around her is put to unusual but fascinatingly funny use in Zürcher’s often gruesomely drawn family context. Karen reacts inscrutably to a husband who is cheating on her, to a daughter who says loudly to her face that she does not love her, to a son being bullied who then turns cruel to the household pets. Besides this expertly drawn dark humour and shocking cruelty, there are predictable familial secrets and traumas to be uncovered, but the writing, direction, and cast are all so effective the film proves highly memorable. By the Stream To say Hong Sang-Soo is a staple of the festival circuit is an understatement: he is the winner of both the Golden Leopard at Locarno and the Silver Bear at Berlin, and his work been selected consistently as well for Cannes and Venice. In fact, in this year, he had films premiere at both the Berlin (A Traveler’s Needs) and Locarno Film Festivals (Suyucheon, By the Stream), just about six months apart – for him, not that unusual, as he has released two films within a year at least eight times (!) in his now long career. This astounding pace of work risks, of course, some level of repetition, and most of his recent films have featured principal actors from an ensemble of regulars as well as fairly reduced location shoots orbiting a set of familiar themes, partially true of By the Stream as well. Set at a woman’s college, an introspective and moody young lecturer Jeo-nim (Kim Min-hee) recruits her aging, TV-famous but retired uncle (Kwon Hae-hyo) to oversee a student production that turns out to be controversial with the higher educational administrators (they bristle at some boos). But By the Stream turns out to be, in its final stretch, one of Hong Sang-Soo’s more effective recent films – it manages to capture the emotional struggles of both the younger generation as it ponders life eponymously by the stream as well as the more retrospective, resigned, and melancholic insights of her late-in-life uncle as he contemplates growing old and the potential for autumnal love. There might be stretches, particularly over the Ozu-like dinner table and its many bottles, that seem all too well worn from Hong Sang-Soo’s oeuvre, but the last half an hour produces a series of surprises that underscore how he continues to push himself in new directions despite the familiar trappings. In Fogo do Vento (Fire of Wind) – one of the highlights of the competition, in my opinion – Marta Mateus explores how farmers at work in a lovely, rolling landscape climb trees when a boisterous bull gets loose (apparently a real occurrence in Alentejo, Portugal, whence Mateus hails and where the film was shot). These surprise and highly cinematic developments afford the agricultural workers a break in their routines and the (tree) time to reflect and communicate more abstract, even philosophical concerns. In addition to the literal change of perspective from above, their arboreal respite fosters the recitation of eloquent dialogue and poetic monologues that engage with their current plight and life in general. The remarkable technique of deliberate delivery of dialogue and stylized lighting of locations recalls the highly artificial, Brechtian approach of Pedro Costa, with a similarly urgent unfolding of both the foundations and fragility of community. In an impressive turn, however, Mateus also leaves a Costa-influenced approach behind with a surprising second half that engages abruptly and effectively with the palimpsest layers of Portuguese history. Director Mateus said she wanted to address how Portugal (and everywhere) is witnessing the subversion of community, the loss of spaces to share stories and passing time together. Bogancloch In Ben Rivers’s Bogancloch, viewers watch an apparently unhoused person, a long-bearded Jake Williams, sleeping in a cluttered car-appended camper. But Williams turns out to have plenty of house, and even an attached greenhouse and barn, so that his lifestyle is a deliberate decision to live “off the grid,” at modern society’s margins and away from its questionable luxuries. Lush black and white images of the nearby forest, the rolling Scottish landscape, and the simple, often decaying objects with which he fills his days convey a thoroughly committed and contemplative person. This free choice of the simple life amid his greenhouse/forest are interrupted, very briefly, by some of the only colour images in the film: older, colour-bleeding photos hinting at a faraway life arrive like signals from a foreign planet. Williams’ cassettes of Middle-Eastern music and his interest in poetry and singing suggest that, although he has chosen to live like a hermit, he does not hate humanity. In fact, there are sudden, surprising scenes of his teaching school children and then singing with a youth group that crosses his path in the hinterlands. The asceticism with which Williams usually lives – especially with minimal modern technology – renders these moments of creative epiphany all the more powerful, and all the more moving. In this vein, Rivers finds a revelatory ending to the film that highlights how living minimally can ground one maximally. The topic of Pia Marais’s fourth feature, Transamazonia, proved itself contemporarily topical: news broke during the festival that a Peruvian Indigenous group near the Brazilian border had attacked a logging crew extracting lumber from their land near the source of the Amazon River. Such long-term tensions, both colonial and environmental, constitute a central plot line in Transamazonia, which simultaneously incorporates a story and sensibility from Werner Herzog’s work. Marais’s opening images happen upon a young girl strapped to stranded airplane seats in the middle of the rainforest, apparently the sole survivor of a crash. Herzog made a film about the reality of such an event, Julianes Sturz in den Dschungel (Wings of Hope, 1998) with the teenager German Juliane Koepcke, who was the sole survivor of a plane struck by lightning. In Marais’s fictionalization and complication of these events in Transamazonia, the sole survivor is a younger, although also German, girl who comes under the tutelage of a US missionary claiming to be her father. Out of this eclectic mixture, Rebecca (Helena Zengel from System Crasher, 2019) becomes a faith healer in the Christian mission in which she has grown up. Her American “father” (Jeremy Xido) exploits her miraculous survival to promote her reputation and his mission along with it. The polyglot dialogue of the film – local Indigenous, colonial Portuguese, missionary English – reflects Marais’s approach, a deliberately diverse one given the complexity of these colonial- and capitalism-riven spaces. These would seem to be many narrative balls in the air (the plane crash, the secret adoption, the political conflict with the Indigenous about logging, the mission familial tensions), and the intersection of the politics of the Amazonian rainforest plus the melodrama of the family tensions is not always effective. But the ambition Marais demonstrates is laudable, especially in conjuring an engrossing fictional story that engages activist battles around extraction and environment. Alaeddine Slim’s Agora uses the police-detective genre to explore social, environmental, and political issues at stake in its Tunisian setting, with its brooding mood and generic scaffolding recalling Lars von Trier’s The Element of Crime (1984), (while its disturbing opening invokes Lynch’s in Blue Velvet (1986) – signalling something rotten in their relevant communities). Although the proceedings might be the dreams of a sleeping, perhaps dead, crow and dog, Fathi (Neji Kanawati) is a world-weary policeman stuck between the unruly citizens and the paranoid higher ups who arrive to investigate a disturbing development: three long missing and presumed dead individuals suddenly reappear and/or reanimate, all in some state of bodily decay. The overarching sense of a communal** doom, even apocalypse, dominates the film’s allegory for the downward trajectory of its society, with ecological and political trouble both signalled. The film is well made, and its generic overtones and allegorical suggestions largely engaging, but it remains at times a bit too elliptical and elusive (perhaps the peril of relying on an unconscious crow and dog as narrators). Luce In Luce, in a small town in southern Italy, an unnamed woman (Marianna Fontana) in her 20s labours under brutal conditions in a leather factory by day and is mostly isolated in her apartment with her cat at night, highlighting again the themes of precarious community. As vividly imaged by directors Luca Bellino and Silvia Luzi, this woman’s manual labour – primarily stretching fresh leather over metal grates – is so taxing that, despite protective gloves, she must soak her hands every evening. A few, relatively brief moments interrupt this rough routine, including a familial first communion for which a videographer uses a drone. Inspired by this aerial display, she appends a phone to the borrowed drone and drops it behind prison walls to reach her incarcerated, never seen father. Soon, she receives a call from an older man who does not seem to be her father, but whose voice provides the empathetic understanding and emotional support she has been seeking. Even as the videographer shows interest in her and her lonely life, she becomes much more invested in these brief phone calls to the prison and the fantasy of an entirely other life that they seem to hold out. The film is shot almost entirely in close-up on the face of actor Fontana, who delivers a moving performance of emotional desperation and delusion that also highlights the paternal acoustic mirror. Foregoing major plot events, the film focuses on emotional states, but the performance and the style largely convince. Gürcan Keltek’s Yeni Safak Solarken (New Dawn Fades) traces a mental breakdown in media res amid breathtaking shots of Istanbul: hardly anything is said for twenty minutes, as young and haunted Akin (Cem Yigit Uzümoglu), flâneur-like, wanders among some of the breathtakingly beautiful religious sights of the Turkish capital (the photography by Peter Zeitlinger, the regular Werner Herzog collaborator, are a strength here). Foregrounding aging religious sites and a lonely wanderer among them underlines again the theme of both community and communion. It slowly emerges that Akin was a theatre actor who began having memorization problems that have given way to a deeper mental crisis, including his seeing “creatures,” hearing voices, and suffering delusions of grandeur. The film combines his meditative meanderings through lovely Istanbul with difficult home interactions with his perplexed family, with a former lover who accompanies him to his doctor, and with an aggressive, drug using friend he met in hospital. There are also, a bit inscrutably, hints of a Balkan war crime in the past of his missing father. The acting and cinematography are impressive – and the mental-health mixture of confusion, sadness, and aggression feels spot on – but the narrative structure does not quite support the film’s other strengths, especially across its more than two-hour running time. In Sulla terra leggeri (Weightless), Sara Fgaier investigates the mechanisms of a memory for a man who has just lost his partner – he seems to be struck by amnesia, so his frustrated daughter gives him his journals from some 40 years before, when he met a Tunisian aviator with whom he fell in love after some early-romance turbulence. Director of a prize winning short The Years (2018), Fgaier offers in this, her feature debut, a work that seems of a piece of recent films about aging and memory struggles, particularly of parents or partners, like Florian Zeller’s The Father (2020) or Haneke’s Amour (2012). Here, although sporting the usual accoutrements of movie-memory depictions like photographs/journals/letters, particularly intriguing is the Proustian sense of multiple and evolving selves across time: the film has different actors playing the younger versions of themselves. If at times sentimental, Weightless is also original and effective in its use of stock footage to evoke the atmosphere of early, confused courtship. It seems a promising, if not quite fully formed debut. 100,000,000,000,000 Monaco at Christmas would suggest the intoxication of Yuletide consumerism in one of the world’s per-capita richest semi-states (apparently it is still a principality), but Virgil Vernier’s 100,000,000,000,000 (Cent mille millards) explores this Monaco milieu in a much more melancholic mood. This is a Monaco and broader Côte d’azur full of detritus and discarded people, with isolated service labourers (including sex workers) catering to the whims of the wealthy as well as to children whose assiduously travelling parents don’t want to be bothered with their progeny. A late teen escort, Afine (Zakaria Bouti) works with a range of lonely and/or frustrated clients: a married middle-aged man advocating working out before they have paid sex, an older woman paying Afine to carry her luxury loot on a shopping trip, and, less a client than a detached friend, a young Serbian nanny explaining some of Monaco’s odder corners as well as its conjuring of more tax-evasion territory from the sea. Vernier has investigated various corners of France in a quasi-documentary, almost sociological mode to explore the lives and dreams of marginal figures, and here, too, the social world is the most convincing aspect of a film limning the boundaries between fiction and documentary. Like many of the films in this year’s competition, it conjures the contortions of contemporary communities under the weight of the past and a future highly uncertain. Locarno Film Festival 7 – 17 August 2024 https://www.locarnofestival.ch/home.html
