Distracted by maneuvers – Newspaper Kommersant No. 144 (7345) of 08/10/2022
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In the two competitions of the Locarno Festival, several films are presented, in the center of which are images of women engaged in the search for truth and justice. From Locarno – Andrey Plakhov.
In the main competition director from Malaysia Wu Ming Chin showed “Stone Turtle” – a bizarre mixture of social essay, oriental melodrama and folklore parable: the film maneuvers between them with more or less success. The social plot basically boils down to the attempts of a young woman Zahara to arrange either her daughter or her niece to go to school, while the local bureaucrat leads the heroine by the nose, demanding more and more new documents.
Under the social layer, a melodramatic layer is revealed: at one time, Zakhara, who worked at a fish factory, became pregnant from a tipsy foreigner, her older sister took the “sin” upon herself and paid for it with her life. Years later, Zahara, who lives with her daughter on a remote island and illegally trades in the eggs of a rare species of turtles, recognizes the girl’s father in a university scientist who came to the island to study and fight for the preservation of those same turtles.
All this is just an event canvas for a ritual performance, the great master of which is Zakhara. Sometimes in dreams, and more often in reality, she arranges bloody acts of retribution – both to the father of her child and to his younger brother. Daggers are used, and not only them.
This bloody plot is contrasted by a parallel one presented by means of animation. A male turtle violates the ban and devours a small tasty fish in the pool, for which higher powers turn him into a stone turtle. And a female turtle finds a rare flower on a high mountain in order to disenchant and revive a friend. Alas, it comes too late. The tortoise woman has already grown old, so her happiness remains in question. In general, we have a mix of poetry, folklore, ethnography and feminism, but it would be an exaggeration to say that this mix turned out to be successful.
The Austrian anti-clerical pamphlet did not work too well either. “I will serve”. He was introduced Ruth Mader, which has a rich track record of festival nominations and awards, but this time did not show the skills of great directing. The action takes place in an elite Catholic school, where girls are instructed on the path of faith, but in fact they only break their psyche. Apparently, the nun-mentor went through such a path at one time, and now three young creatures are under her command. One of them is initially victimized, the other fanatically tortures herself with a sackcloth, the third finds the strength to resist the system of psychological manipulation.
Ruth Mader is clearly trying to follow the path chosen by Ulrich Seidl in his merciless criticism of Austrian society with its double morality.
But, unlike this outstanding director, she does not own the tools of sarcasm and tries in vain to replace it with an annoyingly pumped-up atmosphere of horror, clumsily imitating it through “sinister” music. In the end, having suffered a defeat in the struggle for fragile souls, the monastic activist is sent on a similar mission to Rwanda: a caustic hint at the falsity of post-colonial discourse.
The most harmoniously social and personal united in the Ukrainian picture “How is Katya?”presented in the second competition: it is called “Directors of today”. Anna, a thirty-five-year-old single mother, is desperately fighting for her daughter’s future, working in the night ambulance crew and not getting out of apartment loans. The heroine’s world begins to crumble when eleven-year-old Katya is hit by a car driven by the daughter of a well-known political figure who claims to be mayor.
The story of selective justice, easily conceivable even in countries with a long tradition of democracy, inspires complete credibility here.
Directing Kristina Tinkevich there are no decorative effects and distracting maneuvers, as in the game of the lead actress Anastasia Karpenko. The result is an honest and decent film that stands out against some of its competitors.
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