In the city of scarce muses: Turin 2015

The Turin film festival has a strong reputation as a cinephile affair dedicated to indie films and first-time directors and is reckoned by some to be a good place to sample Italian cinema – a better sampler, it was suggested to me, than Venice, which may be more prone to the pressures of Italy’s commercial producers. Having said that, I’d been warned that Turin’s recent best period was perhaps when Alberto Barbera was director of the city’s National Museum of Cinema and an active president of the festival’s advisory board. He’s now in charge of Venice, so perhaps that advantage has evaporated along with the better levels of funding the festival used to enjoy. I say that because, during my four-day debut visit, interesting new films were scarce.

Of the titles in competition, I saw three: the Danish investigative drama-doc thriller The Idealist, directed by Christina Rosendahl; Sicilian man of violence portrait Nameless Authority by Salvo Cuccia and a witless Tellytubbies-like waste of anybody’s time called The Bear Tales, conceived, presumably under the influence, by Samuel Sestiere and Olmo Amato.

I had hopes for Nameless Authority, purely because of the cold meat stare of actor Fillipo Luna and because the film had a way of holding on to a still moment that I could see had potential for refreshing thrillers – a manner not dissimilar to the early scenes of waiting and smoking in Paolo Sorrentino’s The Consequences of Love. My hopes, however, died quickly amid the would-be smart-cute Tarantino-esque dialogue and the tedious, endless torture of a random innocent victim.

So of the three, Rosendahl’s The Idealist was the only production that felt complete. Yet even this film’s based-on-truth tale of a broadcast journalist bent on revealing the scandal of a B52 crash in Greenland in the 1950s, though well put together, was too interested in aggrandising its lone-wolf hero to notice that the film needed some counterpoint and more imaginative visual scope to make it more than a television drama.

Among the few curios that widened my knowledge of the Italian scene, I was glad to be present at the screening of Des Provinces Lointaines, a ‘cinematic road movie’ about two Piedmontese avant garde filmmakers of reputation, Tonino Di Bernardi and Alberto Momo. Regrettably, however, the advertised English subtitles did not materialise, so I found the film impossible to follow. (Luckily I made the acquaintance of Bernardi and expect to be able to write about his work in the near future.)

A sud di Pavese (To the south of Pavese, 2015)

Being a fan of the Turin novelist and poet Cesare Pavese, I was also happy to watch A sud di Pavese, which visits the southern coastal town of Brancaleone Calabra where he was banished by the pre-war fascist government and where his novel The Beach was set. The documentary is a somewhat thin and freewheeling affair but it did give a real sense of the atmosphere of what was, and still seems, a run-down place, and it has a couple of compelling interviews, not least the one with a middle-aged Southerner who relates that he’s seen more than 100 deaths of young men in his time because of local organised crime.

It can be fun to watch a comedy from a strange context but I couldn’t suspend my disbelief while watching Gianni Zanasi’s zany La Felicita è un sistema complesso. The estimable Italian comic actor Valerio Mastandrea plays an empathetic middle-aged man with a seemingly ridiculous job: he befriends inheritors of large shareholdings in important companies in order to gently persuade them to relinquish control to the professionals. The neat order of his life is subverted, however, when he finds the winsome Avinoam (Hadas Yaron) – the dumped young Israeli girlfriend of his cowardly younger brother – has taken up residence on his floor. She’s soon interfering in his work, but in a way that’s never as cute or revealing as the film thinks it is.

Raphaëll Jacoulot’s Coup de Chaud is equally frustrating. It’s a social-problem ensemble drama based around a small French village suffering a terrible drought. The unbearable climate exacerbates the irritation everyone feels towards Joseph Bousou (Karim Leklou), the disturbed son of a scrap-metal dealer, who likes to steal small objects, play deafeningly loud music in his car and moon about the local blonde, and is a ready-made scapegoat. The melodrama plays out turn by turn, allowing each performer of a solid cast their big moment of overheated haranguing, but the story itself is stunningly obvious.

Mountain (2015)

Which leaves me, happily, with the two best films I encountered. In Yaelle Kayam’s Mountain, an orthodox Jewish family is sent to live in a house right next to the cemetery at the top of The Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. The puny husband, Reuven (Avshalom Pollak), a Yeshiva teacher, tends to stay at work (as far as we know) until late, while the large-bodied wife Tzvia (Shani Klein), through her own domestic efficiency, has time on her hands, despite the three kids she must feed and entertain after school finishes. Neglected sexually, Tzvia wanders the night, becoming fascinated by the pimps and whores who ply their trade at one end of the cemetery each night, eventually bringing them food to eat. To say more of how her dilemma plays out would be to spoil a fine evocative observational drama of some emotional power but also considerable restraint.

In the City of Sylvia director José Luis Guerín’s new film The Academy of Muses offers a deliberate conundrum. It’s constructed in such a way that audiences are likely to cling, at first, to their prejudices.

The Academy of Muses (L'Accademia delle muse, 2015)

We’re plunged at the start into a lecture being given by philology professor Raffaele Pinto (played by a real philology professor called Raffaele Pinto). Are we watching a documentary or a fiction? In a way, we’re oscillating between both. Through various classical texts – more often than not from Dante – Pinto encourages his female students to consider what he describes as the civilising function of muses in the classical tradition. He wants them to become inspirational, mysterious beauties to the men around them, but he gets the angry response such a patriarchal idea deserves. Why should a woman serve to inspire male talent?

We then see Pinto at home, being castigated for his dialectical approach by Rosa (Rosa Delor Muns), his brilliant wife, who suspects it’s all a cover for seduction. When Rosa proves to be correct, it is all too easy to dismiss this voluble film as being about an exploitative unprofessional creep. Yet the debates the students have with Pinto get at some interesting, persistent delusions between the sexes in quite a subtle way. At the very least, it was the most provocative film in Turin.