Jornal da Mostra
Nº 359 > 28ª Mostra > 07/09/2005
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Venice 2005 - Even U.S. cinema is won over by the dignity in ordinary people
U.S. cinema, too, seems won over by the charm of common folk, the so-called ordinary people, with a lifestyle common to the majority of mortals, and nothing to do with characters that are the exception, armed, with muscles and courage, with super powers, in their majority taken from the superhero comic strips.The extraordinary and talented brothers, Ethan and Joel Cohen, produced Romance & Cigarettes, the third feature directed by actor John Torturro, in competition at the 62nd Venice Film Festival. This is a romantic musical comedy that can be said to repeat all of the flaws of the kind of film more befitting to Hollywood, were it not for one important difference - the characters (James Gandolfini and Susan Sarandon) are imbued with what Argentine Master Fernando Solanas defines as La Dignidad de los Nadies (the dignity of ordinary people).
Romance & Cigarettes is about the middle-age crisis, a crisis in a marriage, to the sound of songs that were hits in the sixties, mainly Italian songs translated into American English. On the same lines, but austere, is Bubble, in a special presentation. Bubble is a new film by Steven Soderbergh that radically assumes the concept of independent cinema, with amateur actors and a build-up to a tragedy that is apparently commonplace, but that is the absolute essence of a latent, explosive state in the American psyche. "I made a film away from Hollywood, without necessarily having to leave the United States", says Soderbergh. He did not leave the U.S., but what he did is more on the lines of the virtuosity of Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki, with characters bereft of extravagant expressions, but of unexpected, surprising reactions.
A strange and tragic love threesome comes to be when a young newly-hired working-class girl breaks into the humdrum day-to-day existence of a couple of workmates, mechanically working at their jobs at one of the last doll manufacturers in Ohio - all of the doll trade having apparently migrated to China, a heartless phenomenon of globalization. What is mechanical begins to go awry and ordinary people are all of a sudden in the police news, scarcely aware of the process of violence they are able to trigger.
We owe it to Fernando Solanas, however, for the best explanation of the significance of being nobody at all and yet, being the epicenter of a social upheaval, more precisely against globalization. La Dignidad de los Nadies, his documentary that lends continuity to the emotional Memoria del Saqueo (Prize from the Public at the 28th Mostra Internacional de Cinema), follows along with acts of courage and resistance in an Argentine devastated by the economic crisis, corruption, and the immorality of career politicians. This was one of the most applauded films at the Venice Festival. Solanas goes in search of several anonymous heroes of this social resistance - a man teacher who starts a creche to feed famished children on the outskirts of town, a woman farmer who comes up with an original modality of civil disobedience when she shepherds victims of bankruptcy, like herself, to the courts, where they sing patriotic anthems and religious hymns and who thus succeeds in preventing the loss of their lands in banking auctions; the unemployed laborers in a floor tile factory who decide to re-open and re-activate a ceramics plant that has closed down and, more poignant yet, the solidarity among those who look on as their friends are killed in demonstrations against the government.
Solanas and, surprisingly enough, some of the dissident U.S. diretors from the Hollywood supercinema, have shown, in Venice, that the real superheroes are closer at hand than might be imagined, and that cinema must go in search of an eye-opener in the best real life has to offer.
