Best International Film Reviews: Croatia, Italy, and Portugal

by Cláudio Alves

Let's continue our travels through the Best International Film Oscar submissions, with a focus on Southern European cinema this time. Specifically, today's subjects are the films from Italy, Croatia, and my beloved Portugal. This is a tale of one victor and two persevering losers who still manage to send in new films for consideration every year. While Italy is the category's reigning champion with eleven wins, Croatia and Portugal have yet to be nominated. They've never even made it into the shortlists. In the latter case, the country holds the record for the most submissions without a single nod. With great sadness in my heart, I must say that Portugal's Oscar fate is unlikely to change this season…

SAFE PLACE (Croatia)

© Pipser

Can a gesture be gentle and brutal at the same time? Can a word? A film?

Lay your eyes on Juraj Lerotic's formidable debut, and you'll soon realize the answer to all those questions is an indisputable 'yes.' Safe Place is such a picture where everything is laid out in spartan simplicity, bleak to the bone, and yet the entire thing feels delicately assembled. The screen vibrates with vulnerability to a point where one feels that a stiff breeze or too loud a sound could knock it out of shape, shattering the careful equilibrium Letoric has found. It's a balance between form and subject, resulting in a disciplined approach that could have been alienating if it weren't framing such violent emotions. As it stands, it's a counterweight, a sharp strike that cuts the possibility of melodrama in the bud.

The film starts with an ominous message written across the screen, white on black: "If none of this had happened, I could have told you: Look, this is your building, count to twenty, and I'll come running into the scene." Immediately, Lerotic denounces proximity to the tale he's about to tell, personal attachment colliding with the act of storytelling, both behind and in front of the camera. The language further straddles a line between the direct and the poetic, a strange wavelength that informs what's to come. As soon as a shot of apparent inaction resolves itself through a nervous wreck, Safe Place plunges into a portrayal of unmitigated despair. The man we just saw running into the building is Bruno. His brother, Damir, has just tried to kill himself.

Unfolding like a whispered scream, the tale of two brothers finds a third protagonist in their returning mother. However, the maternal presence isn't as comforting as one might hope, merely adding another vector of dysfunction. Through it all, the script and its players keep the particularities of these lives out of frame, out of reach. Everything's relatively vague but never dishonest or frustratingly opaque, maintaining a steady tenor of authenticity like holding on to a lifeline. Shades of satire complicate the picture, as do spikes of disturbance into the naturalistic milieu. Cinematographer Marko Brdar and editor Marko Ferkovic negotiate these shifting realities with aplomb, achieving a muted elegance in the morose rhythms of broken lives and the Zagreb interiors where they unravel. 

In the end, the title reverberates with ironic portent, as if asking if we truly know the ones we claim to love. Moreover, can we keep them truly safe? Maybe not, no matter how hard we try. B+

NOSTALGIA (Italy)

 © Breaking Glass Pictures"Knowledge is in nostalgia. He who has not lost himself does not know himself," – said Pier Paolo Pasolini, and so says Mario Martone's latest film. That quote opens Nostalgia, setting the stage for a character study that's as much about a man as it is about his hometown. He is the happily-named Felice, whose entire countenance seems defined by a constant air of melancholia, brilliantly embodied by Italian superstar Pierfranceso Favino. The city in question is Naples, to which our sad-faced protagonist returns after a 40-year absence. Something happened all those decades ago, a personal cataclysm that made him flee towards a new life in Egypt.

The mystery of Felice's escape from his old life will anchor much of Nostalgia's second, lesser half. First, however, one must contend with domestic matters, a son reconnecting with his mother after a lifetime of absence, an exiled stranger reacquainting himself with a world that's still seeped deep into his soul. It's difficult to say what's more beguiling in Nostalgia's early passages, the interplay of actors or the beauty captured within the Neapolitan setting. Favino is never better than when sharing scenes with Aurora Quattrocchi, painting a complicated picture of filial duty at the matriarch's end. There's brutality in the material, the hard punch of an imminent end, but the gentleness of reticent touches lingers in the memory.

Nevertheless, the film's true star is neither the son nor the mother. It's not any human, for that matter. Instead, the city itself reclaims that title, exemplifying why that old critical cliché continues to be overused – sometimes, it's truly appropriate to state that the scenery is a character in itself. Naples is memory materialized in all its derelict surfaces and robust silhouettes, palimpsests of time immemorial cascading through sinuous streets that speak of history, pain, and wonderment. Paolo Carnera's cinematography makes poetry out of the urban landscape, while the text adapted from Ermanno Rea's novel pulls the film towards less contemplative moods.

That tension between a formless city symphony and a Camorra-centered plot bends towards the imperatives of commonplace narrative. While some might be drawn to Nostalgia's later, more concrete chapters, my heart belongs to the visions of a man wandering through a city that hasn't changed and yet is categorically not the same as the place of his childhood. That imbalance arbors frustration for the viewer, no matter which facet they might prefer. Still, in its best moments, Nostalgia reaches for and almost grasps the ineffable sublime. B

RELATED READING: Elisa's Cannes Diary, "reshaping the world through voices or silence."

ALMA VIVA (Portugal)

© Fluxus Films

Like Safe Place and Nostalgia, Alma Viva concerns troubled family histories whose fractures are highlighted by an ephemeral return. Death also pays a visit, though the setting is more rural than urbanite, observing old traditions and superstitions within a community that feels trapped in anachronism, lost in time or perchance outside of it. One encounters such an environment through the eyes of a child – Salomé – learning to see magic in mundanity and, paradoxically, quotidian happenstance in suggestions of the beyond. It all begins innocently enough, as the little girl accepts a gift of freshly-caught fish from another youth and has dinner with her family between praying sessions by her grandmother's side.

Tragedy soon strikes, unfortunately, even before the girl's mother is back from France to join the rest of the clan in this summery reunion. Little by little, the mourning rituals bring everyone together, immigrants in communion with those who stayed behind while specters loom over them. Those ghosts are metaphorical, the hauntings of the past, old resentments jumping out as fully-formed monsters ready to devour everything and everyone. They're also supernatural presences that might be all in people's minds or be real. It's difficult to say, as director Cristèle Alves Meira blurs the line between truth and falsehood, between frank fact and the delusions of imaginations inflamed by fear. 

The cineaste is aided in her efforts by Rui Poças' beguiling cinematography, finding Fordian majesty in the portrait of village life while leaving space for infantile terrors to stake their claim on the film. Much love goes to Amine Bouhafa's score and Pierre Deschamps' nifty cuts, constantly negotiating between Alma Viva's two faces, going through accusations of witchcraft into a rainy miracle at the end. That said, the picture's worthiest element is its cast, even though some names famous to Portuguese audiences might rankle for how against-type they are cast. The only fault in this dynamic is how much the adult thespians dominate the picture once funereal matters take over, revealing fascinating histories more magnetic than Salomé's confusion.

And so, Alma Viva struggles to balance these opposing forces, no matter how worthwhile each of them might be in isolation. Together, they predicate an unresolved friction that's more trouble than good. B

Oscar Odds? Italy's Nostalgia is the likeliest shortlist inclusion of this bunch, though Safe Place should be the one scoring the most votes. Sadly, Alma Viva feels doomed to be forgotten by voters, even by those adventurous viewers that delve deep into the submissions list. Maybe things would be different had the selecting committee gone with João Pedro Rodrigues' latest musical fantasia – sadly, Fogo-Fátuo (aka Will-o'-the-Wisp (which just made John Waters top ten list) wasn't even among the final five contenders for the submission. Sure, it wouldn't have altered Portugal's Oscar fate, but I'd be happier with the submission.

Comments

[Peggy Sue]

The hotness of Pierfranceso Favino