Silent Souls and a Body - in the Middle of Water
(What we are mourning over and singing about)
Venice 2010 - Report by Anita Uzulniece, Riga

What finally motivated me and kindled my interest in travelling to the oldest and the best film festival in the world - the Mostra Internazionale D` Arte Cinematografica (the 67th Venice Film Festival, 1 to 12th September 2010) - was the seminar organized by INTERFILM in the framework of the festival presenting Russian Contemporary Cinema. I wanted to personally verify whether or not the traditional superlatives banted about conformed to reality.

For the third time INTERFILM, the International Interchurch Film Organisation, was participating in Venice. The special pretext of this year seminar’s topic was that last summer the festival director, Marco Mueller, had been awarded the Russian Order of Friendship (Orden Druzhby) for the promotion of Russian cinema in the world. It started in 2003 with the Golden Lion’s award to Andrej Zvjagintsev’s film, The Return, and since then the new generation of directors have provided that almost every year Russia is represented in Venice. Welcoming the participants Müller emphasized that now Venice apparently has taken over the place of  the Berlinale, which previously was considered to be the show-window of Russian and other former socialist countries’ cinema. But the fact that also at this year’s 67th Venice Film Festival one of the most interesting and best performances came from Russia was a pleasant surprise and coincidence. This was Aleksei Fedorchenko’s film Silent Souls or The Buntings (Ovsjanki). Already in 2005 his work The First on the Moon (Pervye na Lune) was recognized as the best entry in the section Horizon.

The new film of Fedorchenko tells about a Russian provincial town factory director, whose wife dies. He talks about it only to one colleague, inviting him to take part in his beloved wife's funeral. In this peculiar road movie we learn about love verging on obsession. It turns out that his working and traveling companion had also been captivated by the young woman’s fascination. The film highlights (from the depths of historical memory) the ancient Finno-Ugric tradition, surviving in the memory of a small nation assimilated by the Russian – the Mari. According to it, the dead body is burned and the ashes scattered over the water. The pain inflamed by the hero’s passion which was somehow suppressed during the life time of his wife by jealousy, the magic of the pagan burial ritual, the landscape of Russia, an exquisite soundtrack score, the actors’ existence as if in a forgotten corner of the world and close to Mother Nature - this all logically leads to the finale, where the fatal role is played by the small birds in the cage, carried about everywhere by the director’s colleague.

This new Russian cinema, though evolving in another direction as the mentioned Zvjagintsev, or Aleksej Popogrebskij with his How I Spent Last Summer (Silver Bear for best actors and best camera, Berlin 2010), attracts with the intangible spiritual substance, which, as it turns out, has remained in otherwise outwardly plain-looking individuals and which the filmmakers manage to show in its nuances. As the director explains, the buntings – green-yellow birds, which are reminiscent of American sparrows  ?  are quite common in Russia, however, for most part remain plain and unnoticeable. Just like his movie characters – requiring that one looks deeper into their souls.

Though the official Festival Jury, chaired by Quentin Tarantino, gave the Osella Award "only" to cinematographer Mikhail Krišmanam, the film was recognized as the best film by the FIPRESCI jury and got a Commendation by SIGNIS (Catholic jury).

It is a coincidence that in three films the parting from the deceased is played as a ritual – the dead woman's body is washed. In Post mortem by Chilean director Pablo Larrain (the only Latin American film in this year's competition) it is the job of the 55-year old main character - he is working in a morgue. The lonely man (Alfredo Castro) falls in love with a neighbor, a younger cabaret dancer, and is dragged into the year 1973 protests against the regime of Pinochet. Parallels occur between unreturned love and the suppression of the revolt which expands rather terrifyingly. Burning the shack, where the dancer is hiding from persecutors with her lover, the rejected undertaker seems to take  revenge in his name, but it appears that he acts also on behalf of the regime against which she and her friends protested. The "love story" that takes place in the darkest period in the history of Chile, where love astonishingly turns out to be destructive, is shown as a journey that leads nowhere - not aesthetically, not ethically.

In Promises Written in the Water, both directed and performed by Vincent Gallo, in the center again figures a woman's body. The hero, who promises to protect his ill beloved by not letting her suffer long. To express man's doubts and insecurity, endless repetitions of proofs of love are shown. Though causing quite cheeky and loud protests during the press screening, Gallo’s rather self-centered work, however, made one think about one’s personal identity, about a doppelgänger existence in search for oneself, and about the steadiness or withering of love. Long camera rides along the passed away’s beloved body at the end of the film are both, keeping a promise given at the outset and rebellion against death, commemoration and paying homage to her. In general, it could be perceived as an attempt to play the political, philosophical and antique parable in a rather trivial relationship of today. The unusual form: minimum text, repetitions, close-ups - why not? In music, for example, we accept both minimalism and other "oddities" and can discover something new and enjoy it.

Vincent Gallo dominated on the screens in this year's Venice festival. In Jerzy Skolimowski’s Essential Killing he is the Afghan prisoner, who has escaped from an American convoy and whose „amok run” goes on completely without any human contact, hence without dialogue, in solitude, only in contact with nature, silence and snow, as if becoming a part of nature. Like a wounded beast in flight he has to kill anyone who strays into his path - perhaps an even more accurate translation of the film’s title would be "Existential Murder". The nature of the killings, film rhythm and style fundamentally differ from other cinematographic works, even the kind of classic 'great escape' films where this chain is caused by a first, often accidental crime, such as Bonnie and Clyde, or Thelma and Louise. Vincent Gallo’s solo was evaluated - the jury awarded him the Volpi Cup as Best Actor, conferring to Jerzy Skolimowski its Special Prize. As it turned out, the director had also participated in the Venice Biennale d’arte as a painter, and once had written the script for Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water (the only woman character in Skolimowski’s film is played by Polanski's wife Emmanuel Seigner).

A body was also the centre of one of the most fascinating and tragic films in the competition - Abdellatif Kechiche’s Venus Noire. And nobody was thinking of this woman's soul and spirit. The young woman Sarje Bartman (brilliant Jahima Torres' performance in this role), who in 1817 was brought to Europe from South Africa, is exploited and exhibited as a ferocious beast in London (a parallel with Lynch’s The Elephant Man), later – even more refined – in salons of French aristocrats and brothels. The circle of torture closes when, after seven years of humiliation, the so-called Hottentots Venus leaves this world, her body becoming an object in Paris’ anatomical theatre (remember Herzog’s Kaspar Hauser, and the "normal people" delighted by the protocol of his autopsy!). Of the films based on a true story, Black Venus, which at first glance might be conceived as an old fashioned costume piece, excited and turned the camera eye on ourselves, sitting in the audience, activating some "thorn" of racism stored deep in every person’s subconscious - provoking comparisons with Michael Haneke’s films, despite of their different style, conceptual approach and themes.