La Nostalgia (è ancora quella di un tempo)

Ieri sera stavo andando al cinema dalle parti degli Champs Elysées e, dato che ero in anticipo sull'orario del film, ho pensato di fare un salto in Rue Robert Estienne, dove Truffaut aveva gli uffici della sua casa di produzione, Les Films du Carrosse.

L'aveva chiamata cosi in omaggio al film di Jean Renoir, La Carrosse d'Or.

Apparentemente, nulla è cambiato. Gli uffici sono ancora li, come se François fosse uscito a prendersi un caffé e dovesse tornare da un momento all'altro. 
Solo che non tornerà.

La nostalgia, è ancora quella di un tempo.

La piel que habito

No, questa non è, come molti potrebbero pensare, una recensione dell’ultimo film di Almodóvar, questa è una Dichiarazione d’Amore in piena regola (e il mio post n° 100!).
Più passano gli anni, e meno certezze sento di avere, nella vita.
Ma è da quando sono piccola che il cinema mi accompagna per mano come se fosse un terzo genitore, ed è quindi ovvio che ci siano registi che sento più vicini, perché sono stati con me fin dall’inizio, e non mi hanno mai deluso, né abbandonato.

Sedermi in una sala buia e veder comparire sullo schermo il nome Almodóvar, ha il potere di farmi sentire bene ovunque io sia, comunque io stia. 
Ero giovanissima la prima volta che ho visto un suo film, non avevo nemmeno l’età della ragione, ma già capivo che quest’uomo mi stava dicendo delle cose importanti, delle cose destinate a restare. 
Erano i primi anni ’80. 
Quegli anni che a chi non li ha vissuti e li vede dal di fuori fanno un po’ orrore (come a me gli anni ’70), e che invece dal di dentro erano bellissimi, colorati, strani, intensi, iconoclastici. Erano i tempi in cui tutti insieme appassionatamente odiavamo la Tatcher, e gli inglesi incazzati da morire giravano fim come My Beautiful Laundrette e cantavano canzoni come The Queen is Dead, e ogni giorno c’era un nuovo gruppo da scoprire, un nuovo libro da leggere, un nuovo film da vedere. Erano i tempi pre-tutto: pre-cellulare, pre-iphone, pre-email, pre-facebook. Erano i tempi in cui si viaggiava per l’Europa in Inter-Rail. E io non potrò mai dimenticare l’arrivo a Barcellona, e la città tappezzata di poster allegrissimi e super pop dove un gruppo di donne dai vestiti improbabili e l’aria stranita ti facevano sapere che erano Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (Donne sull'orlo di una crisi di nervi). Il titolo (ma quanto era bello quel titolo?), la foto, quelle facce, tutto mi parlava come se venisse direttamente dalla mia fantasia:

Quelli erano i film della Movida Madrilena, pellicole dove la gente partecipava a gare di peni, le suore prendevano l’LSD, le nonne spacciavano droga, gli uomini facevano sesso tra di loro, le donne pure, i transessuali erano ovunque, e Carmen Maura, come una regina bellissima e sensuale, regnava su questo circo delirante a suon di frasi storiche e spesso sconvolgenti. La libertà, l’irriverenza, l’ironia che sprigionava da questi primi film di Almodóvar non è pari a niente, per me, nella storia del cinema. 

Lui è stato, davvero, il precursore. 

Ma ho capito che era un grande regista il giorno in cui ho visto La Ley del Deseo (La legge del desiderio), un film intenso, cupo, senza sconti e senza speranza sull’insensatezza e la necessità del desiderio. E se proprio dovessi condensare l’intera filmografia di Almodóvar in una parola sola, sarebbe proprio quella lì: Desiderio (e non è forse un caso che la casa di produzione cinematografica che Pedro ha creato con il fratello Agustin, si chiami El Deseo).
Almodóvar è scivolato con noi negli anni ’90, tempi molto più opachi e prevedibili dei precedenti, seguendo un percorso coerente ma un po’ inconstante, dirigendo opere decisamente minori, nelle quali (tra tacchi a spillo e donne mutanti) sembrava non sapere bene dove andare. Eppure era chiara la sua volontà di evolversi, crescere, cambiare. 
Ma è con gli inizi degli anni 2000 che la sua arte trova nuova forma e nuovo splendore. Da Todo sobre mi madre (Tutto su mia madre) in poi, eccezion fatta per il non riuscitissimo La mala educación (La cattiva educazione), Almodóvar ha infilato una serie di film incredibili, compreso quello che è per me il suo capolavoro assoluto: Hable con Ella (Parla con lei).  

I temi sono gli stessi, i personaggi anche, ma il regista ha raggiunto maturità e pienezza, impensabili nel labirinto di passioni della gioventù. Nei suoi film trovano ora posto una dolcezza, un'umanità, uno struggimento ed un dolore che incantano, e la sua regia diventa fluida ed elegante, un vero piacere per gli occhi. Pedro ci regala uomini che piangono senza provare vergogna (non so voi, ma io quell'uomo che piange lo vorrei tanto incontrare nella vita reale), madri credute morte che ritornano come fantasmi a vegliare sulle figlie, e registi ciechi pronti a qualsiasi cosa pur di portare a termine i loro film (a proposito di dichiarazioni d'amore per il cinema...). L'Almodóvar touch è sempre lì, intatto, ma è passato dal trash più spinto alla classe più inaudita, basti pensare al cortometraggio-capolavoro in bianco e nero di Hable con Ella che racconta il viaggio di un uomo in miniatura all'interno del corpo di una donna:

La Piel que habito non è che l'ennesima conferma di un percorso in divenire, di un piacere costante, di un genio all'opera. Banderas è invecchiato ma è sempre Banderas, e i corpi mutano, ma per andare sempre nella stessa direzione. Quella, indovinate un po', dell'umano desiderio.
E mi viene da pensare a quella scena della Ley del Deseo in cui Carmen Maura, bellissimo transessuale, entra nella chiesa che frequentava da piccolo e si mette a cantare, e il prete sente quella voce e le dice: "Un tempo c’era un bambino, qui in parrocchia, che cantava come te". 
E  lei, di rimando: "Padre, quel bambino, sono io!".
Pedro, quel bambino, siamo tutti noi.

Ausente

Last year, I have fallen in love with an Argentinian movie: Plan B.
As it is often the case, when I like a movie I immediately look on Facebook to see if there is a fan page. There wasn’t, though. So I tried with the name of the director: Marco Berger, and I found his personal page. I wrote to him, asking for friendship and telling him how crazy I was about his movie. He accepted. I became a virtual friend not only of Marco, but also of his two actors: Lucas Ferraro and Manuel Vignau. I made a post about the movie, and at the time of 2010 Zazie D’or, I happily assigned to Plan B the Zazie D’or for the Best First Feature Film and to Lucas and Manuel the award for Best Actors. When I advised them, they had the most wonderful reaction: they wrote enthusiastic messages to thank me for the prizes, even if they knew very well that those (unreal) prizes came from an unknown woman having a not famous cinema blog.
This is what I call the good things in life.

Few months ago, I read with excitement that the new movie by Marco, Ausente (Absent), was going to be screened at the 2011 Berlin Film Festival (where it actually won a “real” and important prize: the Teddy Award, the award assigned to the best movie having gay themes). I was really looking forward to seeing it and the other day, always thanks to the Festival Paris Cinéma, I had this chance.
I believe that in a director’s career, the second movie is even more important then the first one. Ausente not only confirmed Marco’s talent, but it also indicates that a new author is born!

Martin is a 16 years old guy. One day, at the end of a swimming class, he claimed to have a problem in his eyes. His coach, Sebastian, brings him first to the hospital and then home. Nobody is at Martin’s place, though, and Sebastian is obliged to let him spend the night at his apartment. It is only the next day that the teacher finds out Martin’s lie: his parents were home, waiting for him. Why Martin wanted to spend the night at his place? Which were his real intentions?
Marco Berger does something very interesting in his movies: he takes a cinema genre, and it turns it into something else. The two pictures have much in common: they start in a certain way (Plan B as a light romantic comedy, Ausente almost as a thriller) and then they both become a quest about desire and unexpected feelings. What is very particular and delicate, in Ausente, is that one of the two characters is underage. Nevertheless, even in this case, Marco reverses the usual roles. This is not the story of a teacher abusing his pupil, but quite the opposite: the most dangerous one, here, is the young guy. But it is exactly when the audience starts to believe that this is going to be a movie about a bad boy, that the film changes and enters into deepest and much troubled waters, the ones of human desires.
I love the way Marco is filming all this. His camera is ON the bodies, as if it was a little animal on the skin of Sebastian and Martin. The shots are simple, clear, essential, wrapping. And once again, the two actors are great: Javier De Pietro has the right face to portrait Martin: he is young, good looking, and his eyes can turn from innocent to seductive in a blink, while Carlos Echevarria (well known in Italy for his roles in Garage Olimpo and Hijos/Figli by Marco Bechis), with his quite and melancholic performance, let us enter into the movie in a special and privileged way.

Marco's movies have one of the greatest quality art can have: a semplicity that rimes with depth and intensity. The only thing is ausente, here, is bad and ordinary cinema.

Que viva Argentina! 

Jerzy Skolimowski, Essential Filming

In these days in Paris there is a great film-festival, the Festival Paris Cinéma, that takes place at the beginning of July every year since 2002. I love it: the offer of movies is simply AMAZING! The program foresees an international competition, various premières, complete retrospectives of few authors and a bunch of guests of honour as well as a country of honour (Mexico, in this case). One of this year’s special guests is the Polish film-maker Jerzy Skolimowski, whose cinema has always intrigued me. On Tuesday night, Skolimoswki was at the Nouveau Latina for a meeting with the public and your indefatigable cinema blogger was there!

Skolimowski (born in Lodz in 1938) looks like a cool, clever and ironic guy: very elegant, a pair of dark sunglasses to cover his eyes, he talked to the audience for more than one hour about his cinema. He doesn’t speak French, so there was a translator ready to let us understand his ideas and thoughts. Skolimowski started his career by co-writing Roman Polanski’s first feature-length, the incredible Knife in the water (a must-seen of cinema history) while still attending the prestigious Lodz National Film School. Between 1964 and 1984, he completed six semi-autobiographical features in which he sometimes played the main role (because, he confessed, when he was young he didn’t have the money to hire a professional actor). As a matter of fact, he kept playing in movies, and you can maybe remember him in LA without a map by Mika Kaurismaki, Before Night Falls by Julian Schnabel or in Eastern Promises by David Cronenberg. After a series of movies based upon novels that he made "for money" and that didn’t contain any “personal element” (by his own admission), Skolimowski stopped making films at the end of the 80s. Luckily enough, he made a coming back in 2008 with the great Four Nights with Anna and then last year with Essential Killing. The movie won the Special Jury Prize at the 2010 Venice Film Festival and Vincent Gallo the Best Actor's award for his incredible interpretation of this Taliban escaping from justice through the cold, snowy and lonely Polish mountains.  

Traumatised by the Second World War (his father was killed by the Nazis), Skolimowski had troubles also with the Polish censorship and was obliged to quit his country (he then lived in London and in LA for many years). While presenting one of his movies in NY in the late 60s, he received a letter from Jean-Luc Godard in which the French film-maker tried to cheer him up towards bad critics: “Don’t worry about what the American critics are writing on your cinema... you and I, we are the best directors in the world!”.

The meeting with the public was followed by the screening of a real gem: Moonlighting, a movie that Skolimowski filmed in London in 1981. I was personally LONGING to see this picture again: I saw it just once in the 80s and I had the most wonderful memory of it. And now I better understand why.
Moonlighting tells the story of four Polish workers arriving in London to renovate their boss apartment. Only one of them, Novak, is able to speak English, and becomes the intermediary between the other three and their new reality. Being illegal workers, they are obliged to stay hidden in the apartment: they are lonely, away from their country and their families, and short on money. Worst of all, when Novak finds out that in Polland the martial law has been declared after a military putsch, he decides not to give the news to his mates. Will they be able to complete the work they came in England for? Will they be able to go back to their country?  

Outstanding and intense social drama, Moonlighting is Skolimowski’s cinema at its best: the style is essential, almost dry, the scenes are constructed to build up a sense of instability, doubt, anguish and alienation. The progressive distance between Novak and the other workers is subtly and masterfully composed. It is almost a thriller, where the suspense is created by unexpected and uneasy events. A story of survival (as it is often the case in Skolimowski’s cinema) and of loss of innocence (the corrupt and capitalistic Western part of Europe vs the innocent and communist Eastern part but also the dramatic drift of the communism). With just few dialogues and a powerful composition of key-scenes, Skolimowski delivered us a true masterpiece. Easy task, I have to say, when you can count on Jeremy Irons to play Novak. Irons, 33 years old at the time, was known until then for his roles in Brideshead Revisited and The French Lieutenant’s Woman. In Moonlighting, he shows what he is able to do: MERAVIGLIE! (oh, and in Polish, of course).   
An essential actor in an essential movie.