25.9.14

Eurasia, my party girl...

...


I am in Kazakstan.
In Almaty, not really the capital city.





As escaped from a shipwreck, a bunch of us, hanging on the rules, on the program.



Long day hours to write, interrupted by the cleaning lady's hoover and by a neighbouring master expecting soluble coffee, 5 times a day...


Sleepless nights for whatever reasons...

Lavish organized visits and traditional horse meat (and sausages), lunches, dinners, en cas...




Harsh bitter-sweet shared stories, looking straight in the eye of people I barely know,
who were with me as in a lifetime...

Sounds and sites that are so different...and that aren't...

oddly enough, I feel very much at home...

...among the 10 films in competition (or 12) at EURASIA,
of which I have already seen 9, there is my fellows' from the FEMIS' piece of work
that tantalizes my mind...

"Party Girl" ( France 2014, by Mari Amachoukeli, Claire Burger, Samuel Theis)
speaks to a side of me
that I could,yes,  
I might be,
I was
in a previous life...
So I ultimately enter
in the Almaty cinema
and watch it again...

...and I saw a woman…
Filled with jewelry that shines and a wild hair bun…
...her name is Angélique,
she’s been a cabaret dancer for 30 years in Alsace and Lorraine.

She used to dance over her legs and ass.
One day, she has to stop.



She puts her clothes back on,
and does all bars,
drifts out in the night until daylight…
She has 4 kids with 4 different men…
One of them, gorgeous man and actor, leaves Paris for saving her.
She goes into rehab.
He writes a movie:
his mother will be its heroine.

Everything is false and everything is true in “Party Girl”.
There is the real family,
and the fiction of a documentary.

 
All the rest is written, acted, segmented
in a funny sort of deviancy
à la Cassavetes
and with a filthy twist
as in the films of Fassbinder…



Precisely as my devouring Almaty vibes...



giulia dobre

7.9.14

A new blasty greek film at the 20th SFF (Sarajevo): "A Blast"


A Blast – Sarajevo Film Festival


 

This is how life goes.

Syllas Tzoumerkas « A Blast »,
with its burning actuality,
should occupy the first pages in all news papers.

It is a film that pushes down the knife
in the open wound of the Greek “question”.

Syllas Tzoumerkas
belongs to those directors
whose work has been highly affected
by the current greek situation.

Four years after
his debut feature film Homeland
(Hora Proelefsis / ΧώραΠροέλευσης, 2010),
Tzoumerkas delivers this sophomore work,
that had its regional premiere
during the 20th Sarajevo Film Festival
and participated in the Official Competition.

It tells the story of a family crisis
where public and personal affairs melt
in an existential mal de vivre
that becomes a tragedy.

 

Maria (Angeliki Papoulia) lives in Athens;
she is mother of three
and married to Yiannis (Vassilis Doganis)
who works abroad as a captain.

Dissatisfied, anxious,
desperate by the bankruptcy
of an entire country,
prostrated by the distance with her husband,
she will explode out of anger.

Tzoumerkas is using Maria’s character
in a highly symbolical role.

 She could incarnate
all those dreadful fragments
of everybody’s life
in the contemporary Greek reality.

As it is a common feeling
that literally
there is no safe place
around us anymore...

Family, who has always been considered
as the crest of stability and serenity,
is now dangerous
and the core of all true problems.

Nowadays the enemy who could destroy us
isn’t some foreign or exterior threat,
but someone close.

The economic crisis has only been
the spark
that inflamed those fragile relationships.

 And since no one can really
be close to anybody,
they could easily be burned.

Assisting the emotional derailing
of the protagonist,
the narrative structure proceeds
in a syncopated manner,
with time inversions
between the past and the present.
They are meant to destabilize the public,

In analogy with the films
of his preceding colleagues (Lanthimos, Avranas),
even “A Blast" uses the body
as a terminal
for frustration.
Their acts become a rebellion
beyond any convention.
 


Hence a film that plays
with Eros and Thanatos
in an unstoppable
and uninhibited
pan sexuality.

The scene where Maria watches porn
in an internet cafe,
surrounded by mail users,
is the sign of that
powerful individual approach
of life. 
And, as the director explained
at his Q and A in Sarajevo,
it remains the only form of defense
in front of the horror of the present.

This is not a film about the crisis,
but a film in crisis.

Courageously driven
to the scattering point.

Where all nerves are tense,
temperatures are elevated,
pressure is at its maximum.

Where there is no other way
than escaping it all.

And Maria announces it, finally serene,
in a monologue that will remain
among the unforgettable scenes
of this rather modest 20th Sarajevo SFF.

There is to say also
that Tzmoumerkas films in a divine manner.
His solutions open up his images
to an endless meaning
that is never exhausted by what we see.
But they stay and dwell for a long time
in our souls…

“A Blast" is definitely
a punch in the stomach
that could help at
waking up the minds…

 

By giulia dobre