The festival in San Sebastian is replete with films about family grievances and traumas

The San Sebastian festival is replete with films about family resentment and trauma. One of them is called “Hello, Mom” and was filmed by Russian debutante Ilya Malakhova: yesterday it premiered in the “New Directors” program. And in the main competition they showed new works by Cristi Puiu and Martin Rechtman. From San Sebastian – Andrey Plakhov.

“Hello, Mom” was filmed by Ilya Malakhova from a distinctly female point of view: there are two sisters, one of whom cannot come to terms with the disappearance of her mother, and the other has two daughters; men have a place only on the periphery. The tone of this family drama is gentle, delicate, not a grain of aggression, but not a drop of sentimentality – a rare combination that is in short supply these days.

Films in the main competition most often cannot boast of this, but there are situations in which, even with the best intentions, it is unlikely that it will be possible to maintain emotional balance, and these are the ones that come to the fore today. Isabella Eklef’s Danish-Swedish Kalak opens with a shocking flashback: an elderly father sexually exploits his young son. Fleeing from these painful memories leads the hero “to the ends of the world” – to Greenland, where he tries to join the culture of the aborigines and gains experience in relationships with women. Adult children find themselves both victims and judges of an abusive father in the Belgian-French Silence by Joachim Lafosse, where the façade of a respectable bourgeois family is dissected. A most unpleasant discovery awaits the hero of the French-Canadian “The Heir” by Xavier Legrand: the thirty-year-old newly minted director of a Parisian fashion house accidentally gets on the trail of crimes (of course, also sexually motivated) of his recently deceased father. Long-standing suspicions and abuses become plot points for a good half of the competition films. At the end of the festival, Taiwanese and Japanese will be added to them, and this is, perhaps, too much.

Even if the focus is on the very insignificant little things in life, behind them you can also look at the traumatic experience – as in the melancholy-absurdist “Practice” by the Argentinean Martin Rechtman. Her klutz hero does not attribute his difficulties to heavy heredity, but strives to overcome them himself, no matter how clumsy it may look. At one time, he escaped from under the skirt of his authoritarian mother and went to Chile, where he gives yoga lessons, with the help of a psychotherapist, sorts out divorce relations with his wife, and treats his knee injury online with a Russian physiotherapist (apparently a charlatan). The picture is full of good-natured ridicule of the infantilism of the urban environment: all these young and not so young people are vegans, they avoid eating onions and garlic, but they swallow packs of antidepressants. Sometimes they lose their memory, and the main character has a habit of falling into a sewer hatch.

It was logical to see the leader of the San Sebastian competition in Cristi Puiu, who stood at the origins of the Romanian “new wave” and represents its existential wing. “MMXX”, however, turned out to be the least convincing of all the works of the eminent director. The title of the film includes “2020” written in Roman numerals—the date of the fatal year of the coronavirus pandemic. It seems that he walked particularly heavily across Romania, raising to life the ghosts of fascism and the totalitarian rule of Ceausescu. Puiu was among the harshest critics of anti-Covid measures: he refused to wear a mask in public, but at the same time was replaced by Matt Dillon on the Venice Festival jury due to “unforeseen difficulties” likely caused by the coronavirus.

“MMXX” consists of four short stories directly or indirectly related to Covid paranoia. In the first, two young women meet – a psychotherapist and her client; after a couple of minutes they throw off their masks, literally and figuratively, and the narcissistic patient quickly seizes the initiative in professional testing. Partially the same characters sort things out in the second short story “Baba with Rum”, discuss the recipe for the perfect birthday cake, and also how to help a pregnant friend sent to give birth in a Covid hospital, where basic attention to the patient can be achieved only by raising a whole crowd to its feet “useful acquaintances” The third and fourth short stories, built, like the previous two, on rattling dialogues, touch on the themes of the Moldavian-Chechen mafia, as well as organ trafficking and organized crime, drawing into this orbit even such “civilized countries” of the European Union as Austria.

Throughout the three-hour film, Puyu manages to make it clear that he is a master of intelligent directing, but loses the main battle. The theme of Covid as the anchor of the entire structure turns out to be ponderous and belated, because already two and a half years ago this motif was brilliantly played out in his film “Bad Fuck, or Crazy Porn” by another Romanian, Radu Jude. He has since made another outstanding film, Don’t Expect Too Much from the End of the World. While Judet’s aesthetics are enriching and developing, Puyu’s, unfortunately, are stagnating.