How complicated simple stories can be…
Certainly, in this year’s competition there were plenty of interesting directors, but lesser overall impressive films. Not they were bad: just two or three of them seemed embarrassing: Devil’s Town for sure, Bel age, arguably. Mostly, there were films made for different kind of audiences, directed idiosyncratic by promising new names of European cinema (and not only European, if we think about Anocha Suwichakornpong), but overall, none of them gave you the impression that you’ve seen something unique and innovative. Sure, most of these directors in competition were at their first feature film, so they have plenty of time to achieve a distinctive voice, but overall the competition was a clash of aesthetics already present in the European filmmaking, reinterpreted by the different new voices. But when you take a look at the awards, you can see that the jury considered their originality as their most precious feature. Two of the films mainly won because they were unconventional, or at least that’s how the five members of the jury reasoned their choices: the winner of the Transylvania Trophy, Mundane History, by Anocha Suwichakornpong, and the winner of the Special Award of the Jury, Last Conversation, are both films easy to encapsulate into a single phrase, but require a lot more if you want to explain why they are unconventional, as they, first of all, need to be seen, second they are extremely visual, they bet on a risky mix of images and they make you think of the various points of view from which you can tell a story.
You can ask yourself after watching these films how much they challenge your perception about a story, ultimately, about reality. What else could their directors want to do, since the story they are coming with is rather simple (as opposed to a “classical” film, where the plot is complicated and you need to “decipher” it), as the title of the winning film indicates – a story of the mundane, but seen from a fresh, innovative perspective? The plot of Mundane History is all about the frustrating daily existence of a teenager, who has to deal with the experience of becoming disabled, but director Anocha Suwichakornpong makes out of it a whole parable of the Thai society; Noud Heerkens, in his Last Conversation, films the monologue of a woman who leaves her lover from a variety of angles. Both these films ask you to understand and accept their premises, otherwise, the simple stories behind them would seem boring and unworthy of your attention. Mundane History, for instance, is filled with symbols and requires you to be aware of them, as it requires you to carefully consider the teenager’s relation to his father, so a little bit of psychoanalysis wouldn’t harm anybody; if you fail do consider all the implications of the film, the final scene, a birth followed from the beginning to the end would seem just a caprice. It’s funny, though, to see the reviews on the internet for Mundane History; my favorite is the one that implies that the failed masturbation scene means something like the impotence in front of one’s own father, and so on. Clearly, that particular viewer didn’t understand the film, or understood too much. But I believe that if you intentionally ant transparently imply that you are going to tell a story of the banal and then charge it with overwhelming significance, you could as well get this kind of review. Anocha Suwichakornpong’s mundane story is not as simple and mundane as it wants to be, nor it is innocent. Maybe it’s a bad habit to want a simple story to be made more complex by dialogue, as the different New Waves got us used to, but I cannot accept that a story that’s meant to be “mundane” happens simultaneously in the everyday life and in the infinite universe of symbols. Mundane History is too bombastic to be simple. As a matter of coincidence, one of the directors who had a film in competition, the ethereal Nothing Personal, was in the jury that granted Anocha Suwichakornpong a Tiger Award at Rotterdam. In the jury that granted her the Transylvania Trophy, there were also two directors, Ineke Smits and Barmak Akram. I believe that their option for a poetic, minimalist feature as Mundane History is sincere and credible. I just can’t stop wondering where the style approached by Anocha Suwichakornpong could lead to; probably, iconoclast directors as Godard would love it, but I find it harder to be touched by a film that’s so emphatic.
There’s no need to repeat here what I’ve written on a previous occasion about Last Conversation. Besides the fact that it “borrows” its concept from a relatively known film, though, I don’t think that this film has anything new to say about the story. We could have watched the whole conversation in a single close-up, as I doubt anybody’s interested in anything else besides Johanna ter Steege’s acting and the details of the plot. Nevertheless, the way Noud Heerkens has placed his camera(s), the best we can see from ter Steege’s face is always partially shadowed; none of the specific points of view available offer us the immediate emotions of the character. We get, instead, al lot of acceptable, rather uninteresting information: the road, the trees alongside the road, and so on. Would we be interested by these images if we were an invisible passenger of the car? Yes, we would, if we would be bored of the conversation that takes place. Noud Heerkens’s direction is that of a photographer, after all: something is interesting and gets to be captured on film because it comes from an unusual angle; the content of the conversation is then of no interest to me, and indeed, the script is close to what any viewer with a little bit of imagination would improvise if, at a casting, he/ she would have to act a separation by phone. If you ignore for moment the conceptual implications of the film (and for some, even that wouldn’t help), then, Last Conversation becomes incredibly dull and insignificant.
The Winner Takes It All or The awards for the Romanian films
At the other end, the jury granted their awards to films with more complex plots, with numerous characters, the kind of films that you mostly watch for the first time with an inherent curiosity for what’s coming next. It wasn’t just the case of the Romanian films, though they were the ones to receive a substantial share of the awards. The Polish film Reverse, one of the highly praised productions in Poland last year, the earnest R or the cinematic poem Altiplano, they all had interesting and intriguing stories, told with an eye for the cinematography. But First of all, Felicia and Medal of Honour were the ones to take home the prizes; somehow ironically, each prize rewarding contributions in the line of work the ones awarded have been previously noticed: Călin Peter Netzer, who previously made another feature film, Maria, received the award for Best Directing, while Răzvan Rădulescu, for the first time director, but screenwriter for quite a few Romanian films, shared with Melissa de Raaf the award for Best Script. Subsequently, Ozana Oancea and Victor Rebengiuc shared the award for Best Actor/ Actress. As Mihai Chirilov stated at the premiere of First of all, Felicia that this film should have been included in competition last year, it’s hard not to think how Rădulescu and de Raaf’s film would have looked like next to Police, adjective. Furthermore, I can’t tell how important for the Romanian cinema First of all, Felicia and Medal of Honour are, since the Romanian stars of this year’s TIFF were all screened out of competition: Cristi Puiu’s Aurora, Radu Muntean’s Tuesday, after Christmas and Andrei Ujică’s Autobiography of Nicolae Ceauşescu. But both of them have been very close to receiving the Audience Award, award that finally went to Daniel Sanchez Arevalo’s mad comedy Fat People. This closeness to the preferences of the Romanian audiences is, I think, really important; somehow, the Romanian audiences are getting used to the Romanian cinema, even if it’s not really that kind of iconoclastic cinema that is appreciated in the festival circuits. Slowly, you can see it developing in Romania the kind of cinema that is more “audience-friendly” and that is more likely to get the people, in a less significant number, but still, back to the theaters. On another level, the awards received by the two Romanian films was a (quasi-)secret triumph for a lesser known generation of screenwriters, that go hand in hand with the new generations of better known directors. Saturday night, it was their night, at least for two of them, Răzvan Rădulescu, who received an award for First of all, Felicia, and Tudor Voican, known for being the screenwriter for Cristi Nemescu’s films, a genuine writer that would have equally deserved an award for his emotional story of the film Medal of Honour.
