D'A - Barcelona International Auteur Film Festival 2015 “A movie that begs one to ponder the essential marriage of ingenuity and faith, of wisdom and spirit, we can only find in the deepest beauty.”

For all its cosmopolitan cache, Barcelona did not have a festival devoted to high-profile, commercially viable independent cinema until quite recently. In its fifth year, Barcelona’s Festival Internacional de Cinema D’Autor (D’A, for short), goes far beyond filling that void. Half a decade into its existence, D’A is earning a reputation for keeping an eye on European film tradition (it hosted retrospectives on Alain Resnais and Bertrand Bonello) while quickly becoming Latin America’s independent cinema European entry point (the festival’s two major prizes were won by Argentine films), as well as consolidating as a can’t-miss date for prestigious directors worldwide (works by Jonathan Glazer, Peter Strickland, Guy Maddin, Larry Clark, and Gregg Araki, were programmed), without stopping to foster young Spanish talent (the biggest audience successes went to homegrown films).

With such a wide scope, it’s difficult to find overarching themes, a narrative, for the event. Out of the 13 films we saw, it is possible to distinguish a desire to expand cinema as a malleable, multihistoric language (two films paid homage to the silent era), an inkling for stories dealing with disaffection and the burdens of sentimental/familial/social relationships, and character studies that double as wider reflections on human experience. We present to you a crop of brief reviews of movies we liked, including several yet to be released in the US, the festival’s Young Talent prize winner (Juana a los 12), and at least two movies we already count among our favorites of the year (La Sapienza and The Forbidden Room).


La Sapienza (Dir. Eugène Green)

The story of a French architect who travels to Italy with his estranged wife, looking for the inspiration of an Old Master, a priori Eugène Green’s latest film resembles a mash-up of The belly of an architect and Copie conforme. With Greenaway, he shares the awe-inspiring Roman scenery and a lead character so passionate for art he cannot understand his life unless through the prism of his idol (Boullée/Borromini), with Kiarostami, a story told in multiple unfolding facets, wherein the theories of its art-scholar protagonist seep into his own life and do away with certainties. Nevertheless, that’s as far as similarities go.

At once modern and classically elegant, La Sapienza is a gorgeous thing to behold, aspiring to a Bressonian austerity and staging each scene like a Baroque painting. It is not, however, the dry, formalist exercise such a description threatens. As soon as the architect and his wife reach Italy, and meet a pair of siblings who at turns appear to be younger versions and polar opposites of the middle-aged couple, the movie becomes filled with increasing amounts of humor and emotion. Yes, there are extended lectures about rivaling schools of Baroque architecture, or the nature of guilt and talent; though, as the characters open up and let us into their most private, the film takes a metaphysical turn, perhaps not in everyone’s taste, but a perfect fit for a movie that begs one to ponder the essential marriage of ingenuity and faith, of wisdom and spirit, we can only find in the deepest beauty.

Favula (Dir. Raúl Perrone)

Nearing his 65th birthday, Raúl Perrone remains at the forefront of Latin American independent cinema. Active since the late 80s, his prolific career was devoted to perfecting a radically raw version of cinema; close to the poor, and all the more powerful for its meager means and unrefined style. Anyhow, beginning with 2013’s P3ND3J05, Perrone’s interests seem to have shifted to meta-cinematic meditations. Without entirely abandoning his themes and subjects, in P3ND3J05 and Favula — his most recent — Perrone explores outdated cinematic techniques, trying to splice silent film modes into his own, fairly postmodern, work.

The story of a poor family considering selling one of their teenage daughters to a creepy character, Favula, alternates between two scenarios: a run-down house and a jungle recalling Tropical Malady’s allegoric final segment. Yet, unlike the operatic triumph of P3ND3J05, Favula highlights some of the contradictions inherent to Perrone’s undertaking: Untrained actors have a hard time connecting with the audience in a silent film, limited as they are to their charisma (or lack thereof; be prepared for many blank stares). A disjointed soundtrack does not help a non-narrative, faintly suggested storyline. An improvisational mise-en-scène undermines any control the director could aim for, etc. There is little doubt that in Favula, Perrone strives for the total-medium aesthetic of Murnau; though, ironically, the staples of his own style turn against him with a vengeance, leaving the Argentine with a hollow mess where he expected to create a universal fable.

Juana a los 12 (Dir. Martín Shanly)

Shot with the efficient matter-of-factualness of a TV production, barely showing a handful of days in the life of a 12-year-old Argentine girl attending a private school, Juana a los 12 sounds like a by-design antidote to Boyhood. And though I’d be the first to criticize Linklater’s film, it’s impossible to ignore the miraculous editing work it displays, outlining a likeable lead character out of hundreds of hours of footage. Thing is, teenagers are not the most genial of individuals. Confused, often unnervingly annoying people, I’m sure everyone would end up hating my guts if there was a movie based on my sulky teenage years. On his debut feature, writer-director Martín Shanly manages to make the titular Juana an interesting, if not relatable, character. The Argentine shows a tender hand when leading the story, not overtly clinical nor succumbing to emotional manipulation. For instance, we never know whether Juana’s internal morass is something she’ll grow out of, an act she’s deliberately playing, or the first manifestations of deep personal scars. Shanly cast his mother and sister for the lead roles, and shot in his own school, guaranteeing a strong grasp over the material and the tone it requires. Hence, there’s a welcome irreverence when dealing with the rituals of a decades-old English school in Buenos Aires, and an awareness of privilege revealed when Shanly drops a few subtle observations on class dynamics — mainly via the interactions between English and local teachers, or Juana’s visits to a private tutor — but it is unclear if Shanly can truly transcend these confines, for his voice is a product of such environments: well-to-do, suburban Buenos Aires. All in all, barely clocking over an hour and a little textbooky — this is the 27-year old’s first feature-length work after graduating film school — Juana a los 12 is just too slight to pass judgment on that.

The Forbidden Room (Dir. Guy Maddin & Evan Johnson)

While it is impossible to summarize the plotline of a movie so enraptured by the joy of storytelling — here murder victims, broken pelvises, moustaches, and even volcanoes tell stories — I can tell you that in The Forbidden Room Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson take a trip through the first few decades of movie history, chasing metaphors for desire. Of course, it’s not that straightforward either. Maddin’s has always been a cinema of multiplicities, colliding styles and time frames, tricky montages that blur fact and fiction, and mannerist recreations; and those characteristics are all pushed to the max in his latest work, perhaps the most accomplished distillation of his universe yet.

An endless cavalcade of stories nested upon stories, The Forbidden Room can only be described as the hallucinatory experience one would have inside a movie archive stocked with Kuchar brothers, Paul Leni, and classic Mondo films. And though storytelling is a key component — there are more than 10 short tales, all of them resolved and connected, even if appealing to the absurdly convoluted — this is also an incredibly sensual film. It accommodates a plethora of stylistic detours: a Ukranian radio play is illuminated in full Soviet-montage glory, an episode featuring an evil scientist and his skeleton goons evokes old Hollywood horror extravaganzas, Ozu and Sternberg lost films are conjured… For sure, The forbidden room is daunting, but not chaotic or hard to follow. All episodes are bound by the story of a lost submarine crew, struggling between their duties to an AWOL captain and their imminent death by asphyxiation. Are these stand-ins for the director and the audience? Not really. In the story that truly envelops them all, a lumberjack tries to rescue his lover from an intertemporal dream-prison; a task in league with Orpheus’. Are the submariners his Argonauts, then? Maybe. Like Pasolini in his mythical cycle, Maddin and Evans search for primordial truths that transpire human — and in The forbidden room’s case, cinematic — history, vying for what falls in between the mesmeric power of poetry and the primal persistence of a fart joke.

Eden (Dir. Mian Hasen-Løve)

There are few things sadder than an over-the-hill DJ refusing to accept his time has passed. That’s the central conceit to Mia Hansen-Løve’s latest offering, wherein she portrays the career arc of house-aficionado-cum-DJ Paul Vallée, half of the fictional French touch duo Cheers. Inspired by her brother’s story — a real life DJ and her co-writer — Hansen-Løve leads us from the early 90s and the advent of Paris’ own brand of electronic music, to the present; showing what her lead character’s life is up to, in two-year incremental glimpses. And though that’s as linear a structure as one gets, the fragments she chooses to depict avoid sliding into the nostalgic/predictable. There is little stress on period detail, not even the music betraying much of a timeline, nor the characters visibly “aging” the 20+ years that go by.

No doubt Eden can be sold as your typical rockstar movie: there will be drugs, the banging of hot-albeit-spiritually-unfulfilling women, looming failure too plain for the star to see, suicides, a bitter downfall… The obvious catch is, instead of a rockstar, here we get a house DJ. The not so obvious catch, and possibly the film’s one redeeming feature, there is no hint of idealism in the movie. Paul and his friends just go through the motions, they escalate from fans to label heads because that’s the thing to do. If any passion motivates them, it is too subtle for us to seize. That complicates empathizing with the main characters, but is a crucial point to Hansen-Løve’s narrative. Though never spelled out, such deep-rooted vacuity might explain the achingly opposed trajectories Daft Punk and Cheers follow; the famous duo’s love for their art exposed during a pre-stardom house party Paul and his friends attend.

Though there is moderate namedropping, Eden is not a shadow portrait of the French house scene. We do get a taste of that, with Paul’s parties moving from an underground start — fueled by fanzines and pirate radio stations revealing a rave party’s location only to phone-in guests — to hosting star DJs in luxury suites, conquering MOMA in the wake of Discovery, to finally languish playing wedding receptions. Despite capturing the mood of those moments with precision, the heart of the movie is elsewhere; seen the clearest in the evolution of Paul’s one meaningful relationship — from a brokenhearted fling to a mature friendship — or the support he gets from his family when picking up the pieces of something that did not amount to a dream, but was no less painful to lose for that.

In the basement (Dir. Ulrich Seidl)

Ulrich Seidl, one of the great chroniclers of Austrian depravity, strikes again. This time, he literally takes us to his subject’s basements for an unsettling tour to the secret lives of his otherwise unremarkable compatriots. In those spaces of deep intimacy, where Austrians make a habit of revealing the characteristics they keep hidden to all, we find everything from the mundane (model train collectors, workout buffs), the humdrum (lots of BDSM), the outrageous (an opera-singing gun enthusiast), and the disturbing (a tuba-playing, Nazi alcoholic).

Composed as a successions of eerily symmetric tableaus, what promised to be one of Seidl’s most bluntly inquisitive set-ups, turns out to be his tamest offering yet. Of course there is plenty of bizarre, scandalous imagery on display; In the Basement’s flaw is ontological: What’s the point of all this supposed to be? It’s easy to find equally private/disturbing, albeit less artfully shot, material of this nature online. The fact that we all keep unsavory aspects of our personalities hidden — in more or less figurative basements — is not revelatory. On the contrary, that’s a pedestrian idea to examine if all we get from it is closeted xenophobes and fat people getting whipped. Is reveling in the grotesque enough to hold this movie together? The constantly laughing audience I saw the film with apparently agreed. True, there are sufficiently visible hints of intervention/fictionalization to appease exploitative concerns, and Seidl is not the director to expect an exposé from.

Then again, not even a seasoned pope of Austrian filth can be beyond reproach, can he? The best simile to describe the feeling the movie provokes, is suggested by itself. A tough-looking dude wearing a cammo tank top looms over a large python, his back to the camera as the alien-yellow reptile gets ready to devour a mouse. It’s a scene predictable in its conclusion; though, placed before the opening credits roll, it leaves one unsure whether it’s there just for shock value or if Seidl is trying to say something else. Is he implying himself to be the predator? Are we? After all, even cynical contemplation can be sinful.

Queen of Earth (Dir. Alex Ross Perry)

Shot in the style of seventies psychodramas (3 Women, Repulsion, even The Other and Carrie, barring the supernatural), Queen of Earth tells the story of two women’s friendship as it unfolds over a tumultuous year, with each of them going through sentimental turmoil; and does so via interlocking episodes taking place in a lakeside house during holiday breaks. Powerful performances by its co-leads notwithstanding, the movie’s studied structure is its strongest feat. Following Samuel Fuller’s famous dictum — “If a story doesn’t give you a hard-on in the first couple of scenes, throw it in the goddamn garbage” — it’s a painfully meddlesome opening scene what gets us invested in a movie one could describe as rich brats taking turns at being passive aggressive. An enthralling Elisabeth Moss makes us care about the nervous breakdown she’s counting her best friend’s help to avert; the reason behind her returning to the cottage one year after her last, not really pleasant, visit.

Conveying the two young women’s interactions via long, detached monologues, Ross Perry establishes a rapport nobody could mistake for kinship. Using tight, often awkward close-ups, he continues to emphasizes his characters borderline-sociopathic self-absorption. The idyllic surroundings, photographed invariably in the early morning or during dusk, come across as claustrophobic, dimming out the real and the imaginary. Yet, although such an ominous mood is something the movie actively seeks — the soundtrack and editing would befit a horror thriller — the story’s truly sickening tangents are rather ordinary. Ross Perry implies these women’s friendship to have collapsed simply because of misperceived intentions. Is one of them enacting an excessive revenge on the other? Are they belligerent with the other’s boyfriends out of jealousy, fearing for the end of their affective monopoly? Enjoyable may not be the word to describe a film about narcissists so stuck up their egotistical bubbles; but Queen of Earth certainly is an intriguing inquiry on dependency, masking as a disciplined genre exercise.

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