Three songs about the motherlands – Newspaper Kommersant No. 146 (7347) of 08/12/2022

Many films of the Locarno Festival recreate the mythology of the countries and territories that gave birth to them. I understood the peculiarities of national patriotism Andrey Plakhov.

Director Carlos Conceição places the film’s action “Valiant Nation” in 1974, the last year of Portuguese rule in Angola. The atmosphere of violence appears already in the prologue to the picture, where it is shown how a girl from an Angolan tribe captivates the heart of a pious and poetry-appreciating Portuguese soldier. Trying to overcome carnal temptation, he prays and then shoots her.

The main action takes place in a walled camp where seven feral soldiers are locked up under the command of a sadistic colonel. One day they break out of prison, but return back with a trophy – a large portrait of Brigitte Bardot – and make an icon out of it. The colonel, in order to tame the soldiers ready to rebel, brings a prostitute to the camp, but then the situation completely gets out of control. The main point of the film is that the entire system of colonial army drill is based on instilling the same mythology into young men – that they are defending their land from evil and treacherous enemies. While in fact the “enemies” never left their own land and did not lay claim to others.

In a significantly more complicated, more intellectual version, the mythologeme of war as a matrix of consciousness is present in the Azerbaijani film Sermon to the Fish.

Its director Hilal Baydarov, a former mathematician from Baku, studied with Bela Tarr and managed to attract Carlos Reygadas as a producer of his projects. “Sermon to the Fish” – the second part of the trilogy of “war stories”; the first – “From death to death” – was shown two years ago in Venice. The same young hero, Davud, returns from the war and finds himself in a dead village: all its inhabitants have rotted alive. Only the hero’s sister remained, she also already had spots of illness on her hands and face, but she is trying to cling to life, communicating in a sublimely poetic language with rocks, roads, wind and trees. The cause of the mass deadly disease is clear – human greed. The beautiful nature of these places is destroyed, the ubiquitous rusty oil pumps have turned the fish-rich lakes into a bubbling stinking slurry. The first emotional climax of the film: a fish lying on the table, cooked for food, flares up like a torch from a match.

Second climax: Davud jumps up and stands at attention, having heard the imaginary call of his commander; before that, like a spell, he pronounces the names of his dead comrades – who, it seems to him, died through his fault: Abbas, Samir, Bakhtiyar, Ramil, Novruz, Abdullah, Nizami … The cry of the survivors for those who did not return is devoid of nostalgic notes, but the war remains the worst of the evils that deplete the very land that, according to patriotic mythology, it is called upon to protect. “Sermon to the Fish” is a film “overcooked” in places, but with ambitions – sometimes it even prompts you to remember “Stalker”.

The third “song about the motherland” in the Locarno competition was an absurdist black comedy “Gigi Law” Alessandro Comodina. Her hero is an eccentric police officer patrolling the streets of a sleepy town in the Italian region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia. Since nothing ever happens here, Gigi satisfies her professional hunger by spying on “suspicious” neighbors. At the same time, with his oddities, he causes dissatisfaction with both the authorities and the inhabitants of the town: the garden near his house, for example, has grown so much that it has turned into an impenetrable jungle, and gigantic trees threaten to collapse on neighboring plots.

Some variety in the life of the province is made by the increasing cases of suicides on the railway. Someone is mentally damaged, and the police take him to a psychiatric hospital. However, Gigi himself seems to confuse reality with fantasy. Rather virtual is his flirting with a new police officer, with whom the hero communicates by radio. This non-professional paradocumentary is inspired by regional mythology and Pasolini’s poetic texts, but lacks his temperament and therefore does not sound at its full potential.