Locarno Film Festival 2021: Festival Dispatch 1

As Locarno’s 74th edition draws to a close, Film Inquiry is here with a rundown of the highlights of this year’s Swiss festival. For the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic struck – and at the helm of incoming artistic director Giana A. Nazzaro – the festival was held in person, with a generous amount of the press corps attending in-person at the picturesque, lakeside town. Over the course of eleven days, this festival has proven to be a historic one for new emerging, daring voices in international cinema. 

Notable Worldwide Premieres

Locarno’s Piazza Grande saw two worldwide premieres with the return of their historic open-air cinema, the first being Soul of a Beast, Lorenz Merz’ unique genre-bending visual trip set on the moonlit streets of Zurich. When teen dad Gabriel finds himself entrenched in a love triangle with his best friend Joel’s (Tonatiuh Radzi) girlfriend Corey (Ella Rumpf), reality descends off a cliff. 

It comes as no surprise that Merz’ technical background is behind the lens as DOP, with other former training in artistic painting that clearly show through in the film’s visuals. While the plot loses its own thread at points, the cinematography,  filmed in academy ratio and speckled with nods to Japanese cinematic giants, and drawing critical comparisons to Wong Kar Wai’s Fallen Angels, stays interesting. While many have tried to emulate the sort of aestheticism present in Wong Kar Wai’s films, Merz manages quite masterfully to borrow from the palette, all the while still managing to keep his own singular voice alive.

It is by far the most interesting film visually at the festival. The director himself stipulates that he doesn’t want his films to be digested and intellectualized, simply experienced, and Soul of a Beast is nothing if not an experience. It is a hybrid, completely feverish film worth checking out: one that will either hit or miss.

Then there was the international premiere of Gleb Panfilov’s Russian epic 100 Minutes, based on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s literary classic following a Russian soldier’s imprisonment in a Stalinist Gulag: a promising, but ultimately fatalistic piece of cinema. This isn’t to say that Solzhenitsyn sets forward an optimistic conclusion himself, but in this overlong piece, Panfilov isn’t exactly making any new conclusions that haven’t already been made by his predecessors. The long-banned text probes the hypocrisy of Stalinism, but Panfilov seems only to reiterate the dialogue. 

New Swiss Cinema

On the domestic front, the Swiss Zürcher brothers make their return with The Girl and the Spider, a Berlin-School style dramedy premiering in the festival’s Panorama Suisse slate. A chamber piece of sorts, the premise is relatively simple: Roommates Lisa (Liliane Amuat) and Mara (Henriette Confurius) must disband when Lisa decides to move into a new apartment in Bern, Switzerland. Mara is there, on move-in day, along with a variety of other characters: Lisa’s mother, friends, new neighbours, and handymen.

With The Girl and the Spider, the sibling directorial duo once again interrogate interior lives. Except here, they’ve concocted a film that tiptoes on desire, all the while exercising a frustrating amount of restraint. The film teases out queer possibilities; between Lisa and Mara, Mara and Lisa’s new neighbour, but, as is with the relationship between all characters in the film, never arrives at any sort of climax or relief between the tension. 

The Zürcher brothers do something really interesting with Confurius’ Mara; who deflects from her latent yearning by distracting herself in other dissociative tasks: fiddling with a hangnail, sharp objects lying around the house, or picking at her face. 

Through an ever-revolving chain of characters peering through doorways, holding quiet conversations, while others watch or  avert their gazes, an infinite number of sexual possibilities spring into view. This can be quite amusing at first, but without any narrative breaking the cycle, it quickly becomes frustrating for the viewer. 

With crisp aesthetic command and modernist storytelling, The Girl and the Spider is curious, albeit entirely unbearable with its failure to arrive at, well, anywhere other than Lisa’s new apartment. While The Girl and the Spider represents just the classic kind of arthouse you expect to see making the rounds in festivals, Soul of a Beast is exactly the antithesis of that. 

New International Voices 

Perhaps the most arresting film of the festival was hidden in the Concorso Cineasti del presente slate; Hleb Papou’s stunning feature film debut Il Legionario, which follows Daniel (Germano Gentile), the only African-Italian in the Roman riot police.  Tasked with violently evicting a building of refugees that include his mother and brother, he suddenly finds himself pulled between the racist forces that employ him and his very own blood. Leads Germano Gentile and Maurizio Bousso‘s performances as the drifting siblings are delivered with aplomb. Slurs are thrown around with ease and pleasure by Daniel’s colleagues, who refer to him patronizingly as ‘hot choco’ — including one scene where Daniel wears a t-shirt reading “f*ck the police” while having lunch with those same crude policemen. 

It is no mere coincidence that Hleb Papou’s title teases out a reference to the Mussolini’s fascist mouthpiece, Il Legionario. Papou, a native Belarusian, tackles the thawing of Italian nationalism from within the police forces. Born out of a 2017 short by the same name, the dichotomies of racial injustice and systematic oppression explored are only more relevant today, echoing outside of Italian society and rippling globally. Il Legionario earned a nod from the jury with a Special Mention. 

Finally, a personal favourite of mine that went critically unnoticed was Nava Rezvani’s Iranian short, Mask. It follows a young Iranian woman who undergoes cosmetic surgery on her lips at her boyfriend’s behest, setting off a probe into her own autonomy and identity. Many different ideas are being cross-questioned, compactly and smartly on a miniature scale. With a compelling narrative style similar to countryman Asghar Farhadi, this is the Tehran native’s third short, and I’m looking forward to seeing what she’ll do next. 

The 74th Locarno Film Festival took place between August 3 to August 14th, 2021.