The first to aim for everything was the director of miracles like Poetry (2010) or Burning (2018). What Lee Chang-dong proposes now is a story of simple appearance. A film director approaches the laid-off workers of a factory to shoot what is intended to be a documentary. Nothing more. The director himself confesses that the origin of the film was the urgency to intervene in the social debate that arose when the strike of factory workers ended with a very violent police action. Initially, everything unfolds through the familiar process of cinema within cinema. The viewer is invited to witness the very construction of a film that aims to be at the same time the reconstruction - construction upon construction - of a very specific event. Nothing more.
What happens is that things are rarely simply what they seem. It would seem that things are closer to what "appear." Indeed, little by little, A Possible Love becomes increasingly complex, turning into a sharp and very poignant reflection on representation itself, on its mechanism both emancipatory and submissive, on the hierarchy that places the creator on one side and the object of study on the other. The delicate and moving artifact designed by the Korean not only discusses from a political standpoint the legitimacy of a system that turns a good part of citizens into exploitation fodder; it also questions that entertainment for idle bourgeois that is cinema in its arrogant performance of speaking for others, giving voice to those who supposedly do not have it.
And all this, and this is relevant, hand in hand with a narrative that is emotional to exasperation, tense, dazzling, and with an unprecedented sensitivity to detail. In the plot, the wealthy family that dedicates itself to portraying the suffering of the now unemployed workers, and the poor family that carries all the traumas of dedicating their nights and days to something as useless, strange, and alienating as work, pretend a friendship too similar to a new form of subjugation. What is being discussed is the very essence of a society thrown into the consumption of itself unequal, classist, schizophrenic, and subjected to a violent order that is more than just capricious. And all this while exposing the, let's say, cultural representation strategies that keep an essentially unjust panorama standing. Welcome to capitalism, one might add.
Despite everything, Chang-dong's precise humanism seeks not so much denunciation for the sake of denunciation or a loud proclamation but the possibility of resistance and, hand in hand, the obligation of love. A Possible Love is fundamentally a film about desire itself, about freedom, about the eyes of a child that suddenly open, about the longing of everyone who strives to reach the sublime. Just like that.
Lee Chang-dong and Sul Kyung-gu at the presentation of A Possible Love.Alessandra TarantinoAP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino
The Echo Chamber: The contemporary touch of the best Bertolucci (****)
Not far behind in this race for perfection, Pallaoro, to whom we owe a film as raw and disproportionate as Hannah (2017), wanted to present the most beautiful, contradictory, and imperfect of films. He did so with the last script that Bertolucci lent his own story to.The Echo Chamber is a story of love and pain. Nothing more. The idea is to reconstruct the relationship of passion and dependency, of sex and conversations with wine, of presence and absence, of freedom and simple slavery between the characters played by Luca Marinelli and Alicia Vikander. The former is a music producer and the latter a nurse. The former suffers, and the latter soothes. And so on. And in between, Susan Sarandon brings to life a singer with the demeanor and posture of an eternal myth in cinema and song; a widow who gradually learns to use suffering to create, which is how a wound of the unfathomable is calmed (not healed).
With these elements, the director confines his characters to an apartment. Nothing more. Sometimes they appear together, and other times, separately. At times, the present is discussed, and at moments, the past is revisited. They seek each other and reject each other. They miss each other and ignore each other. The idea is to build a labyrinth of mirrors and times in which a world of contradictions is reflected, where the grace of the graceful force of love rests alongside what hurts the most; where pure freedom demands, as the poet would say, "to be imprisoned in someone whose name I cannot hear without shivering."
With very talented and profound actors, what remains is a deep, disconcerting, and full film. Pallaoro does not like tracking shots like Bertolucci, but his virtuosity in finding continuities where everything seems to be rupture disarms as the responsible for La Luna did at his time. And what a beautiful and painfully final scene, my god.
May el-Toukhy at the presentation of Woman Unknown.EFE
Woman Unknown: Woman Had to Be (****)
Finally, on this perfect day of fish, bananas, fish bananas, and deaths in Venice, it was the turn of the Danish May el-Toukhy. She has the rare and cruel honor of being the only woman to sign a film solo in the competitive section. And perhaps to continue the conversation, she did not miss the opportunity to do honor to the honor. Woman Unknown is, as the title suggests, a story of women. And it is not only because the protagonist is a woman, or because it deals with what happened to women in Denmark after World War II, and certainly not because it proposes the woman's body itself as a battlefield and object of subjugation.
No, it is essentially a story of women because it is a story that was missing. The question is: Why, despite so many films about D-days, H-hours, and alpha heroes, has no one ever stopped to address one of the greatest dramas that humanity, all of it, suffered, which was turning women's sexual behavior into an affront to national identity? If they have no answer, it is because the answer is too obvious. As obvious as the guilty absurdity of a film festival discriminating against half of the population based on, they say, "quality" criteria. Moreover, although it speaks of Denmark, it applies to any country in the world.
The story is about a maid who, by the whims of fate, will soon become a lady. She will marry the master. Everything unfolds in the midst of jubilation after the victory over Nazism, where impunity is the only law that this so-called patriotism adheres to. The women who were known (or suspected) of having German lovers are publicly humiliated. Based on this starting point, El-Toukhy composes a historical melodrama that appears classical but is truly and in its revolutionary way. The strategy is to dismantle the traditional grammar to adapt it to the feelings, actions, movements, and cleansing of that great unknown without a penis between her legs.
What follows is a story as feverish and fiery as it is rigorously new despite the, let's say, excessively orthodox artifice. The director achieves the most challenging of all: imposing her voice on a stage filled with echoes of others. The body and desire of the woman, for the first time. We have taken too long. "To rest in perfection is the desire of everyone who strives to reach the sublime," Mann said, and Woman, Woman Unknown, responds.