Liberty
The Locarno Festival, its host town pinned between lake and mountain, is likewise sandwiched each August between the two premiere hot-weather European film festivals of Cannes and Venice. Aside from the justifiably famous 8,000 seat capacity screenings in the city’s open-air Piazza Grande, Locarno wisely cedes both red carpet camera-seeking impulses as well as big-name openings to these more celebrity-focused institutions. In favor of pursuing a wide-ranging presentation of new films, the festival generally favors a smaller, more idiosyncratic side of art cinema that at its best can be greatly freeing and deeply engaged. The 71st edition promises several anticipated pictures, including a new feature by the delightful American “anti-animator” Jodie Mack, who usually works in short films, the fifth Hong Sang-soo movie in 18 months, the feature debut of María Alche—the lead actress from Lucrecia Martel’s The Holy Girl—and Argentine director Mariano Llinás’s long-awaited (and 13.5 hour!) follow up to his great 2008 epic Extraordinary Stories. More often than not, and especially this year where recognizable auteurs are mostly absent from the program, the pleasures here are not known quantities but rather are to be discovered. This aspect is brilliantly conjoined (in what should be taken as a lesson to all film festivals, big and small ) with significant and substantial retrospectives. This year's retrospectives are devoted to that great American studio director, Leo McCarey, a genius of comedy and romantic coupling who started in the silent era, who also has considerable responsibility for the pairing of Laurel and Hardy and the loose-limbed romcom brilliance of The Awful Truth (1938).
In fact, the first film screened on the opening day was a McCarey film: that most delightful paean to the liberating wonders of American democracy, Ruggles of Red Gap (1935). The film's placement at the festival’s beginning was no doubt a statement for the world of tolerance and good humor. An endearingly cherubic and outrageously mincing Charles Laughton plays an English servant lost in a poker match to a charmingly boorish couple of nouveau riche Americans from the frontier of Washington state, played with cartoonish aplomb by Charles Ruggles (no relation) and Mary Boland. After an unbeatably merry opening act in Paris—wherein the stiff propriety of the manservant encounters the brash, guileless friendliness of Ruggles’ check-suited millionaire—the film sets to break down the old world’s aristocratic hierarchies by dropping the abashed Englishman in the unprejudiced and class-free social scene of the town of Red Gap. A fantasy, certainly, and one McCarey acknowledges with the casual inclusion of a Chinese and black servant in the Ruggles-Boland household, and the persistent satire of the high-class aspirations of Boland and an insipid family in-law. But truly real or not, the sentiment of down-to-earth American openness is one of promise, and delivered with such discomforting hilarity that I found myself uncertain whether to tear-up or break down in giggles at this personal favorite.
The scenario of Ruggles is one bursting with possibilities. It is to the credit of McCarey and his unpretentious, anti-formalist technique that the film frees its performers and the storytelling to make good. The same can’t quite be said about Ying Liang’s A Family Tour, premiering in the international competition, a film whose creativity feels stifled by the promise and heartbreak of its story, which suggests a unique combination of autobiography, Taiwanese tour, spy film, family reunion, and behind-the-scenes look at independent Chinese filmmaking. It tells of a female Chinese filmmaker working in exile in Hong Kong after her provocative previous feature is targeted for government suppression (a parallel to Ying and his last film, When Night Falls). She uses an invitation to a film festival in Taiwan as a pretext to bring her ailing mother from Sichuan, so that the older woman can meet her grandchild and her daughter, who she hasn’t seen in five years. During the mother's mandatory, pre-arranged tour of the country, the daughter—accompanied by her husband and child—bribes the tour director so that her family can continually meet the woman during various rest stops and sightseeing. Supposedly curious bystanders, including an increasingly ominous man also escorting his elderly father on tour, ask just enough questions to make one suspect on-going Chinese surveillance. All the while, the filmmaker suffers from her creative inactivity since her previous film, her attempt to bring a project about Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement to completion, the pressures this has put on her marriage, her status as an exile, and the generational and ideological disconnect she finds in meeting after meeting with her mother. It is, as one may easily see, a very loaded work, and one fraught with a muffled, anguished quality. Like Mohammad Rasoulof’s Manuscripts Don’t Burn, Ying's film is produced in a clandestine manner, forced to turn inward, and racked by conflicted feelings of home. That such a film was made—about such a thing, under such circumstances—is remarkable. But I couldn’t help but feel there could be a more alive film that juggled such ambitious ideas, rather than what felt more like an introduction of concept, situation and pain, rather than their electric animation.
Back in the McCarey retrospective, the often abject absurdity of life was treated with exaggeration rather than extreme restraint. Perhaps most shocking of all—and, yes, silent comedies can be shocking too!—was the finale of 1924’s Outdoor Pajamas (McCarey films of this era are a goldmine of great titles), a Charley Chase roundelay where two women and three men each are chasing the affably mustachioed chap for their own reasons—he left one at the altar, oversleeping his wedding, another mistakes him for the husband who’s beating his sister, a cop wants to arrest him for public indecency (pajamas, you know), and so on. As the whole group finally ends up in the same room, with at least three guns pointed at a very perturbed Chase, the film cuts to a cinema manager in front of the screen, who informs the audience watching that anyone who wants a refund to such a picture is due. Cut to a whole theatre running for the exits: the end. This is the kind of solution found in a truly free cinema.
Conversely, we find Laurel and Hardy prisoners of this hard, material existence. I caught them on the ginormous Piazza Grande screen, where Liberty had been cleverly inserted before the opening night film, the better to hook the large audience on cinema’s most endearing same-sex couple and their suffering at the hands of our implacable, immovable world. This 1929 short’s first half is all pants gags: the wrong pants on the wrong man, pants falling down, policeman discovering pants-swapping, back-taxi pants shenanigans, frozen crabs de-frosting in pants and "nipping" bottoms small and large—the whole embarrassingly hilarious check-list. (Let me now point out here that in the opening credits Laurel and Hardy are implied to be following in the legacy of Washington, Lincoln, and Pershing.) But the second half, oh the second half! Stan and Ollie get stuck at the top of a half-completed skyscraper—as seems the wont for so many silent comedians, Los Angeles of the 1920s a veritable playground of comic construction sites—when an elevator strands them in the stratosphere and the two spend what feels like forever gradually making their way ‘round a square-shaped gridiron to reach a ladder which (of course) fails to be of use. After many, many minutes, the duo end up going all the way back to where they started in the first place. Watching this singular, vertigo-inspiring set-piece dragged out to heightened exasperation in fashion typical to both the comedians and McCarey is no different, let’s admit, than watching the awe-inspiring end of Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia, as we hold our breath beyond our ability waiting for a miracle to happen: for humanity to be saved.