Young shell – Newspaper Kommersant No. 177 (7378) of 09/26/2022

The main prize “Golden Shell” of the 70th festival in San Sebastian was awarded to the Colombian film “Kings of the World” about outcast teenagers undertaking a perilous journey to the ends of the world. Most of the other awards of the main competition also went to films about youth. comments Andrey Plakhov.

The competitive program of the anniversary festival was very decent, so the jury had different options for the distribution of prizes. But she chose the simplest and most obvious: female directing plus a youth theme.

“Kings of the World” combines both. This is an anarchist movie about five homeless guys who leave the asphalt jungle of a big city for the sake of reserved places, where one of them is promised a piece of land under the restitution program, once taken away from his grandmother by bandits-“revolutionaries”. Laura Mora experienced cruelty and violence first hand: her father was killed, and this was the source of her debut film, Kill Jesus. In the very first frames of the new picture, we feel violence and danger; the whole life of teenagers hanging out on the streets of Medellin, teetering on the edge of death. But, as is typical of reckless youth, they are not afraid of anything: in their life, the more risk, the more adrenaline. In addition, they are supported by brotherly relations, which, of course, will be tested during a crazy journey through the green hills of the tropical jungle.

The emotional climax of the picture is the stop of young heroes in a baroque building, where a strange exotic brothel is located. Curvaceous women with withered faces, who are the age of boys in a mother, if not in a grandmother, behave motherly towards young clients who have never known family warmth. This episode, full of innocent tenderness, ends, and the magnificent five again enter the big road, where they will face both the corrupt bureaucracy and the bandits. They will never get the desired plot of the promised land, but the viewer will have the opportunity, together with the characters, to enjoy the magnificent mountain landscapes, filmed in the relaxed rhythms of a drug trip.

For the past two years, San Sebastian has insistently affirmed the priority of female directing. Two years ago, The Beginning by Georgian Dea Kulumbegashvili (a really great film) won here, last year – Blue Moon by Romanian Alina Grigore, the picture is already worse, but with an actual agenda. And now it was the turn of the Colombian Laura Mora. I don’t think it’s 100% the best film of the festival, but it has the energy and cinematography to engage and fire up the audience. There is also a mood that corresponds to today: hooligan skepticism and a sense of helplessness in front of the unjust world order dominate in the picture. It seems that as this world, ruled by gerontocracy, is moving towards decline, cinema is striving, at least in the artistic imagination, to appoint really young people as kings and queens.

Roughly the same, adjusted for a more melancholic style, can be said about the other road movie “Runner”; debutante Marian Matias, who shot it, was awarded the Special Jury Prize. Here, too, the landscape plays a crucial role – this time the American Midwest: fields and roads washed by rain. Here, the rhythm is quite relaxed, and the image is sometimes given out of focus. Here, too, young heroes – an eighteen-year-old girl who lost her father, and a guy traveling in search of work; between them there is a shaky connection, explained by their restlessness.

The emphasis on youth plots and characters corresponds to the age structure of the awarded actors. Although in fact the best actress of the festival was the 48-year-old Portuguese Beatriz Batarda, the prize for the main female role did not go to her, but to three times the youngest Spaniard Carla Quiles, whose heroine in the film “Motherhood” Pilar Palomero became a mother at fourteen years old. And Paul Kircher was recognized as the best actor, who played the young alter ego of the famous French director in Christophe Honore’s The Winter Boy. In addition, the very young Renata Lerman received an award for her role as the protagonist’s troubled daughter in the Argentine film The Replacement, which was directed by Diego Lerman. And, frankly, it’s overkill. A girl with no acting experience under the guidance of her father coped with the task quite well, but it is ridiculous to reward her for her work in a film where two excellent adult actors participate – Juan Minukhin and Alfredo Castro. The only award-winning film that breaks the trend is Japan’s Hundred Flowers, a sentimental drama about age-related dementia, unexpectedly crowned with the Silver Shell for Best Director. Perhaps the increased attention to it is due to the fact that its director Genki Kawamura is well known as a producer of cult animated films and series.

However, the much more serious fame of the Austrian Ulrich Seidl and the Korean Hong Sang-soo did not help either of them to win at least some encouragement for their new works. Not only them, but also two other films that would rightly be attributed to the top of the competition – “The Rite of Spring” by the Spaniard Fernando Franco and “Great Yarmouth: Preliminary Figures” by the Portuguese Marco Martins – remained without awards. No wonder: they simply did not fit into the conceptual layout of the jury’s priorities.