Neil Young at the recent Linz Film Festival saw one movie outshine all the competition
ONE of the joys of film festivals is the serendipitous discovery: the film about which you know very little, but impulsively decide to check out on the basis that, if the first 20 minutes fails to grab the attention, you can always segue to an alternative programme in a nearby cinema. This was the state of mind in which I approached the Czech documentary René on the final day of the sixth Crossing Europe – the film-festival that, since 2004, has confirmed the status of Linz, upper Austria’s industrial, Danube-straddling capital, on the cultural map. This year, it’s succeeded Liverpool as European Capital of Culture.
I’d heard absolutely no buzz about René, which had already screened – and I wasn’t very encouraged either by the poster, showing a sallow-faced, stringy-haired chap showing off his neck-tattoos (“Fuck of people” [sic]), or by the catalogue description.
“The incredible story of a young man accompanied by a film camera from the age of 18, on his life’s journey between prisons and short intermezzos outside. After another 18 years, we leave him as a 36-year-old man, an unlikely writer, a seriously ill patient and unfortunately still an incorrigible criminal. The story of René unfolds against the backdrop of significant political changes in central Europe, the reflections of which remain omnipresent in the film. René’s history opens in a prison full of socialist banners, continues through the “Velvet Revolution” and finds him back in prison at the time of the Czech Republic joining the EU.”
How utterly mistaken I was. After less than 15 minutes, I was hooked. After an hour, I realised that René is among the very finest achievements of European documentary in the past decade. The likes of Hunger and Bronson are all very well, but as a portrait of the institutionalised individual – intelligent, articulate, confrontational – René is in another class again.
Born in Prague in 1949, director Helena Trestikova likes to make her films over very long periods of time. And her many years spent interviewing René Plasil, from the age of 16, yield enormous dividends.
As well as being an astonishing portrait of a remarkable individual, René the movie poses some complex and troubling questions about the relationship between the documentarian and the documented – in this case, a stormy one which at one stage sees René burgling Trestikova’s apartment. The film places the viewer in a difficult position. We’re enormously thankful for the insights that the director obtains, but we marvel that she has such patience with a man who seems to take especially perverse delight in letting her – and himself – down at every opportunity.
René is a film of such sensitivity and skill that it emphatically deserves to obtain wide distribution. In a just world, it would have at least as much exposure as James Marsh’s Man On Wire, which it rightly beat for the title of 2008’s Best Documentary at the European Film Awards in Copenhagen last December.
In fact, René made pretty much everything else in the Crossing Europe programme look like pretty small beer. But overall this was a strong renewal of a festival which concentrates exclusively on European fare, admittedly via a rather generous definition of the continent’s borders. As in previous years, there was a commendably strong commitment to documentary, including the “Working Worlds” strand of films tackling labour-related issues.
Among other non-fiction highlights, I was beguiled by the French reportage movie Children of Don Quixote (Act One) by Ronan Dénécé and the brothers Jean-Baptiste and Augustin Legrand, chronicling the efforts by an activist collective to highlight the problem of homelessness in Paris and beyond. A rousingly rough-edged peek behind the headlines, the film functions both as a how-to manual for staging political campaigns in the 21st century (where success relies on a savvy media-manipulation) and also as a reminder that the spirit of 1968 is alive and well in France, no matter how strenuously Nicolas Sarkozy might claim otherwise.
A rather more ruminative and experimental use of the documentary form was presented by Lithuania’s Audrius Stonys, subject of a retrospective-cum-tribute at last year’s Crossing Europe. This year, he was back in town and in fine form with his latest two works: a pair of medium-length films presented in a double bill. Four Steps skilfully edits together footage of four weddings to present a tapestry of eastern Europe over the course of four tumultuous decades. The Bell examines one particular local urban legend and folk tale, in which a deep lake may or may not hide a long-submerged bell. How intriguing to find shades of Iris Murdoch in the remote Lithuanian countryside. Of all Crossing Europe’s presentations, few could match The Bell in terms of the sheer beauty and majesty of its undersea photography, although audiences in search of answers” may have been somewhat disgruntled by the poetically inconclusive finale.
Conventional expectations were likewise pleasingly frustrated in the realms of fictional cinema – at least, among the festival’s most accomplished examples of the form. Among the 11-strong competition field, my personal pick was Ruben Ostlund’s Involuntary, an elliptical and bold compilation of fragmentary scenes which, taken together, trace the slender social networks and fault-lines that go to define the state of modern Sweden. While Ostlund’s technique nods to the styles established by his acclaimed countrymen, Lukas and Roy Andersson, by my reckoning, he’s more accomplished and penetrating than either. His film is a hypnotic, ultimately devastating journey into individual neuroses and national psychoses.
Elsewhere in the programme, audiences had the rare opportunity to sample all three chapters of Italian horror legend Dario Argento’s “Three Mothers” trilogy: his 1977 masterpiece Suspiria, 1980’s follow-up Inferno (in a German-dubbed print that detracted not one iota from the berserk majesty of the director’s maverick, surreal vision), and then his long-delayed third chapter, Mother of Tears (La Terza Madre). The latter is an utterly absurd but deliriously enjoyable fricassee of violence, mutilation and pseudo-anthropological mumbo-jumbo starring the director’s über-vamp daughter Asia.
Argento wasn’t the only veteran to score during Crossing Europe. Local artist Dietmar Brehm served up a selection of his latest shorts which, while uneven, confirmed his status among the more reliable and boundary-pushing avante garde film-makers on the continent.
Inger Lise Hansen, from Norway, was on hand to introduce a full retrospective of her time-condensing shorts –the best of which was 1995’s Static.
Hansen’s fellow Norwegian, Eilif Bremer Landsend, all of 19, served notice of quite scary precocity with his eight-minute wonder, Last Stop. This is executed with a confidence and economy that would be impressive in an artist twice his age. Five years older, Brazil-born German Iuri Maia Jost is also a name to watch. His Building Site was part of a showcase of works from students at the art school in Karlsruhe that were shot on old 16mm stock, developed in a bucket and then hung out to dry on a washing-line. It’s nice to know that, in this era of digital projection and mega-budget CGI, it’s still possible for aspiring filmmakers to get their hands well and truly dirty. René Plasil would undoubtedly approve.
