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Locarno 2014.
Related Films

Impressions Part I:
People as Places as FROM WHAT IS
BEFORE

People Lav Diaz

Two great films in the earlygoing at Locarno: Lav Diaz's "From

What is Before" & Matìas Piñeiro's "The Princess of France".

Adam Cook • 10 AGO 2014 THE PRINCESS OF

FRANCE
Matías Piñeiro

There are many reasons why Locarno is my favourite film

A MALDIÇÃO
festival. It has the most effectively DAvaried
temporally SERPENTE
and Directed by KEN RUSSELL
regionally diverse program of films there is—hop from Pedro
Costa's latest to a masterpiece by Agnès Varda, Vittorio De
Sica, or Victor Erice (often on 35mm, it should be noted), or
discover an Italian film in the Titanus retrospective by a
filmmaker you've never heard of. It's also the environment
itself, which enables, for me, the most engaging experience of
moviegoing: a perfect balance of relaxed atmosphere, an
endless array of interesting films, and an audience of
cinephiles eager to shuffle into every screening. After all, it is
the people who define places, and the transient international
population of Locarno transforms the Italian-Swiss town into a
summer camp of movie lovers. With the (mostly) no-BS
program of films spanning cinema's reach geographically and
historically, and a selection of the 'new' predicated on quality
rather than Cannes-esque media attention-grabbing, Locarno
is a very difficult place to be jaded, even for the most
hardened veterans of globetrotting cinephilia.

This year, an extraordinary way to begin a film festival was

afforded those who arrived early enough to attend the very
first press screening, that of Lav Diaz's five-and-a-half hour
From What Is Before. Beginning free of dialogue, the early
parts of the film are defined by the landscapes of its Filipino
countryside setting. Traversing these landscapes are figures
that will become characters over the next few hours, as detail
by detail is slowly divulged as the film gracefully, surprisingly
unfolds. The environment is the main character of the first
hour or so—a sense of the synchronicity in people and place
is imbued in every scene, every shot, until this relationship
becomes disrupted, and the film reveals its true self. Until the
film's true cards are finally illuminated, you become lulled by
Before's subtle rhythms, the emphasis on nature, rocks, waves,
the sounds of the forest. But as layer by layer is peeled back,
the dark, aching core of the film takes over.

Increasingly complex, political, and emotional, From What is

Before is a painful remembrance of a period of transition that
marked the traumatic time of dictator Ferdinand Marcos' rule,
and in particular the proclamation of martial law in 1972, seven
years into his time in power. However, the film's political
context is almost entirely peripheral until late in the film, which
reshapes what comes before in its slowly unfurling structure.
Strange occurrences in a remote barrio slowly spreads fear
amidst its inhabitants: slaughtered cows, a body at the side of
a road, burned homes, strange noises. But the source of the
town's new sufferings is anonymous: something in the air, a
whispered change in the wind. We get to know the members
of this community: a young woman struggling with cerebral
palsy and the devoted sister at her side, an enigmatic
winemaker, a priest, a little boy and the haunted man who
takes care of him... Several small stories alternate among one
another, intertwining unassumingly. The narrative threads of
the film, at first loose, tighten and in light of later
developments come to reflect a nation's uneasy and
tumultuous shift into paranoia and useless violence, as reality
fades into nightmare.

Once a military presence establishes itself, the town's ties

slowly dissolve. The population faces new struggles, and
dwindles as a result. Some evacuate, some perish, leaving only
the ghost of a former place, the people a fading memory of
the landscape, that now knows only cruelty and madness. The
film manages to tiptoe around strict allegory using the power
of suggestiveness in favour of overwrought symbolism, and
retains the essentialism of being a modest, albeit devastating,
story of a place and its people.

In almost comical contrast to Diaz’s epic slowburner, the next

film I saw was Matías Piñeiro's 70-minute The Princess of
France, the follow-up to the director's acclaimed 2012 feature,
Viola. Another exploration (or teasing, perhaps, as Piñeiro's
interaction with the material is characteristically playful and
humble) of Shakespeare, this time around the source material
is Love's Labour's Lost. The film's characters are reuniting to
put on a radio show of the Shakespeare play—one that they
had previously performed together (though this is something
we merely glimpse). Now, they revolve around one another in a
web of romances, friendships, and fictions. Victor is the center
of it all, the director of the play, and his relationships with his
five actresses are each distinct, different pathways of life and
love.

Matías Piñeiro's films are light as a feather, and indeed The

Princess of France exemplifies this quality. Soft, warm, gentle
—it is a film that flutters about, intricately constructed but
formally defined by the people within its frames. The camera
is glued to the characters, but not to their faces in simple
close ups, but rather in a pliable orbit around them, attuned to
their gestures, their spirit. As much as Piñeiro's focus is on the
text, and expanding possibilities of working with Shakespeare,
his attention seems equally transfixed by his love for people,
their words, movements, smiles, feelings, hopes. The camera
dances with the characters in a ballet of graceful movement.
Each sequence has its own set of pleasures and sensations. A
shot looking down from a rooftop at a concrete soccer pitch (I
won't spoil the actual content of this stunning long take)
opens the film on a whimsical, fantastical note before we're
tugged into the performance of the play, and into the world of
the characters. One scene (another long take) follows as
musicians work on a score to accompany the radio play. An
actor reads from the text as the camera pans back and forth
as they try two different pieces to go with the reading. The
love for the words here is (out?)matched by a love for
capturing moments, and weaving them together in an ode, not
to just to Shakespeare, but to music, friendship, cinema.

This is the third of Piñeiro's "Shakespereads," and there are

already two more being developed. These films are quietly
forming one of the most unique continuums of work today,
:
challenging notions of how we interpret and apply such sacred
source material, not simply working in adaptation but building
on and appropriating the text to find new ideas, stories, and
forms.

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