It’s been three days since the first screenings at the Transilvania International Film Festival (TIFF) and the program looks rather balanced: for each film shown in the official competition, there is somewhere another screening that would likely make you forget about the twelve fresh films competing for the Transilvania Trophy. Four of the twelve were already screened: Nothing Personal, A Rational Solution, R and Reverse. On the other hand, the main attraction this weekend are the classics, and first of all the restored Metropolis, sold out Saturday at noon; his length made it impossible for anybody curious about the so-called “final version” to attend any of the films from the competition, screened at the same time with Metropolis; then, the Spanish version of Dracula, accompanied by the guitar virtuoso Gary Lucas; last but not least, the restored version of the Archers’ Red Shoes, a classic film about the ultimate sacrifice for art, whose first sequence, of a bunch of students literally fighting to attend a musical premiere, contrasted the few empty chairs at the screening, Sunday evening.
Nothing Personal, directed by Urszula Antoniak
For those who are more concerned about the main competition, there is no reason to worry about; although the names of the directors are mostly unknown in Romania (and probably in most of the Europe), the Victoria Theater, where the screenings of the films shown in competition take place, is eventually packed each evening. I guess that, year after year, the audience got used to the idea that there can’t be really bad films in competition. It isn’t the case for the four films already screened either, but for the one curious film buff who had the time to check the three films arrived from the this year’s Berlinale competition (the Russian film How I Ended This Summer, Thomas Vinterberg’s fresh Submarino and the Romanian debut When I Want to Whistle, I Whistle), it’s clear by comparison that something’s missing from the Transylvanian competition so far. Maybe it’s just because the three directors from the Berlinale competition all managed to deliver films that you could watch breathless and that are very hard to subsume to a certain genre (is it thriller? maybe drama? is it just an European deconstruction of the American cinema?), while here at Cluj things are unfortunately much clearer, concerning the genres, and less challenging when it comes to the actual stories we saw.
Reverse, directed by Borys Lankosz
You can’t say that the four films are totally lacking qualities; each of these films has its strong point: for Nothing Personal and Reverse, it’s the cinematography, A Rational Solution has its share of deadpan, Scandinavian humor, while R is concise and brutal from the beginning to the end. You could say these films are all excellent as samples of the European cinema of the end of the decade. The trouble with them is that they don’t make you give them an award, although you can admire their grace, their silent beauty, their perfect concision or, at times, their exuberance. I remember that at the screening of Nothing Personal, a subtle and haunting film about loneliness and love, after several minutes of silence, somewhere in the theater a cell phone begun to ring, and its ring tone was a tune taken from the soundtrack of Slumdog Millionaire that many would recognize, “Paper Planes”. I wonder how many thought, laughing, “this must be it! This is what’s missing! I mean, not necessarily a soundtrack, but the vitality and the energy of it, certainly…” The screening have surely proved that the directors of the four films were aware of their craft and didn’t lack a spark of occasional creative madness, but they also seemed to repeat ad nauseam the tricks they knew best. A Rational Solution, the Swedish comedy that looks like a Bergman film, rewritten by the Woody Allen who made Husbands and Wives and re-melted into Swedish sensibilities, the main absurd situation is enough to drive the whole story to a sarcastic and cathartic climax: two married couples accept to share the same house, in order to “cure” the affair that started between of the husbands and his best friend’s wife. As the antidote for the “problem” means that the two left aside should pretend they’re indifferent to the obvious sexual escapades of the other two, the film is a funny and excellent character study of helplessness. But, first of all, it isn’t the first time that Scandinavian cinema is addressing this problem, and first time director Jorgen Bergmark is probably aware of it: the excellent Together by Lukas Moodysson had a secondary plot involving the infantile reactions of a man left aside by his girlfriend for one of the many members of a Swedish community of the seventies, and the honest and ironic treatment of post 68 sexualities was also one of the strong points of Together, as it is for A Rational Solution. Inspired or not from Moodysson’s film, A Rational Solution eventually fails because Bergmark on and on the same scene with little variations until the moment of the epilogue.
A Rational Solution, directed by Jorgen Bergmark
R, on the other hand, is so much a copy (even if an incidental one) of Audiard’s highly praised A Prophet, on so many levels – style, similar stories, even details – that one can do noting else but ask why an almost identical film was eventually produced (on the other hand, I imagine an urgent question coming from the other side of the Atlantic: “what’s wrong with these Europeans, all of a sudden making mostly films about the prison system?”). And it’s not that R is a bad film, on the contrary; but it arrived too late, born to be the second. You wouldn’t say that, if you think that one of the directors, Tobias Lindholmm, is also the screenwriter of the great recent Danish film Submarino, a film that’s equally comprised of slices of life of the outcasts of society, but driven towards greatness by a far more experienced director (Vinterberg) and containing a more comestible form of cruelty than R.
R, directed by Tobias Lindholm & Michael Noer
Reverse, the first feature film of a Polish auteur of documentaries, Borys Lankosz, smoothly unifies genres and would be ideal for an award, if it weren’t for its twisted structure, temporally sliced into a story happening in communist Poland of the fifties and another one, happening several years later, after the fall of the communism, but opposed so much stylistically that you’re hardly watching the same film, but a great story and its useless appendix. Combined with archival footage, the story happening in the fifties is nevertheless great, almost tailored for Eastern Europe audiences, in its depiction of the silent and brutal realities of a repressive regime, hidden under a mask of respectability and glamour.
Lastly, one of the biggest surprises of this year’s TIFF is a television drama, made by three different (and lesser known) British directors, although one of them, James Marsh, could be familiar to certain audiences foe winning the Academy Award for best documentary with one of the most beautiful documentaries ever, Man on Wire. Entitled The Red Riding Trilogy, the film is comprised by three segments, 1974, 1980 and 1983, and is a must-see in its original cut, before Ridley Scott keeps his promise and makes his own film based on David Peace well-received books. The best of the three parts, maybe because it succeeds best in establishing the premises for the rotten North in which the story happens, is the first one, 1974, directed frantically by Julian Jarrold and ended into such a somber tonality, that would immediately make you think of the best anti-establishment films of the seventies. The whole trilogy is eventually longer than five hours and is ultimately one of the most asphyxiating films of the festival so far, but coming out of the theater, I never heard even a single complaint about it.
