by Elisa Giudici
A couple of weeks after having saying goodbye to Cannes and to the superb blue sea of the French Riviera, I am back at it by the majestic, cloudy mountains of Switzerland for the Locarno Film Festival: the long summer of European festival continues!
Up top you see the Piazza Grande (the biggest outdoor screen in Europe!) where we'll discover smaller movies and younger directors than the ones seen (and reviewed) at the Croisette. Unfortunately today the weather is really rainy. I am writing these lines with my raincoat on, wishing I followed that note I write to my future self every year at Locarno to stuff appropriate clothes in my car for mountain weather. The scenery is really majestic though, with clouds moving fast over the mountain tops and the city, like you're inside Olivier Assayas' Sils Maria.
Enough with scenery, let's talk about the opening night film...
Washington, Director Ferdinando Cito Filomarino, and Vicky Krieps in Locarno
It's premiere night for Ferdinando Cito Filomarino's Beckett. Everyone here is anxiously awaiting the arrival of auteur Luca Guadagnino, who produced the movie (and is also the ex-partner of Cito Filomarino.)
Beckett
This is a good opening for Locarno Film Festival but a strange addition to Netflix's ever-growing action catalogue. Beckett is written and directed by Ferdinando Cito Filomarino with the mood of a 70's paranoia political thriller, a touch of Hitchcock, and a very very serious attitude that makes you suspect the main story is based on real events (it's not).
John David Washington plays Becket -- a reference to the Irish playwright and also an ambiguous first name that can also be a surname. He's an American tourist visiting Greece with his girlfriend April (Alicia Vikander). They are very much in love. Scared by the demonstrations at Syntagma Plaza (after the financial austerity imposed by Troika in 2010) they decide to change their plans, leaving the capitol city behind to visit the back country. After a car crash Beckett discovers the police want him dead at any cost; he is without money, food, telephone, or a change of clothes in a country in which people barely understand English. What's more he's far from the American Embassy in Athens, possibly the only place he'd be safe.
Ferdinando Cito Filomarino conveys real ambition here behind the camera. He wants to shoot an action movie in which the thrills derive not from the athletics of fighting bad guys or spectacular stunts, but from the complete lack of these elements. Beckett's tensions instead spring from the environment (Greek mountains, Athens flooded by protesters) surrounding a common man who is as far from an action hero as he is from political awareness of the situation at hand.
When John David Washington takes his shirt off we see he is fit but heavier than the usual accidental hero destined to become a fugitive in these kind of movies (Washington offers that Ferdinando invited him to dinner a lot during shooting!). Cito Filomarino is really good at finding the frictions within language barriers, a growing mistrust of power and structures, and the geography of places -- running for you life on a cliff is not as easy or as spectacular as other action movies suggest.
Though the movie is rarely explicitly political, it is clear why Cito Filomarino chose Greece during Austerity as the setting. Beckett's lack of responsiveness to society and the politics around him almost kills him, while the Greek people he encounters are more savvy about this and ready to mistrust police and power. The choice of the character's race is a powerful move: Beckett carries a US passport which grants him some protection and privileges but he's also someone who looks more like the thousands of migrants in Greece who are trying to avoid police attention on trains to Northern Europe.
Beckett is quite a lot more ambitious than your usual action fare on Netflix, yet the attempt to combine paranoid thriller, realistic action, and a Le Carré like spy story is not always convincing. It is also very heavy. While it's a solid second feature for the filmmaker after 2015's Antonia, a dash of irony, a lighter touch, or more memorable characters would have gone a long way.
Beckett begins streaming August 27th on Netflix.