Jornal da Mostra
“La Stella che non c’è”, by Gianni Amelio
Nº 430 > 29ª Mostra > 08/09/2006
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Leon Cakoff, de Veneza, para o ‘Jornal da Mostra’
Edição:
Renata de Almeida e Leon Cakoff
Edição:
Renata de Almeida e Leon Cakoff
GLOBALIZED WORLD SEEN WITH ANGUISH BY TSAI MING LIANG, JIA ZHANG-KE AND GIANNI AMELIO
Confidences by Michel Ciment, a veteran French writer and critic for the magazine ‘Positif’, at the end of one of the screenings of Venice 63: “Festivals are the ones to blame for it. American movies don’t need to be ashamed of presenting An uptight movie, a commercial one, it will always be selected and everyone thinks it’s normal. But the cinema from anywhere else, if it shows any commercial feature, is condemned by the same festivals and won’t be selected. All the other cinemas need to be experimental, mysterious, and full of enigmas, to be selected and cheered by these audiences, in Venice, Cannes. After the festivals they won’t get to be shown to any other audience...”We hope this won’t be the fate of four films (three from Asia and one from Italy) seen in Venice, between experimental and cognitive, though extremely sensible to what is happening of violent and silent in this part of the world affected by globalization.
Tsai Ming Liang returns to Malasia, where he was born, changes the sceneries in Taiwan where he has always shot, to make “Hei yanquan/ I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone”. This time his fetish actor Lee Kang-Sheng plays two roles – that of a handicapped in a coma and that of a Chinese wanderer in Kuala Lumpur, a capital taken by workers from all parts of Asia in search for work. It is a group of workers from Bangladesh that save them from being spanked and take them to the improvised dormitory where they live. The Chinese gains protection and affection from one of the Hindi boys, who makes him sleep on an old mattress they found on the streets. But the Chinese will be disputed also by a young servant, the one in charge of his double in a coma.
The talented Chinese maker Jia Zhang-Ke had his new “Sanxia Haoren/ Still Life” presented in competition, but as a surprise. He is the director of “The World”, awarded at the 29th São Paulo Festival. “Still Life” registers the whip of the Three Gorges valley, which, in the name of progress, of the growing need of China to produce energy, is being flooded by the dam of a hydroelectric plant. Human suffering is the least important for this progress.
Jia Zhang-Ke registers the despair of this people in his melancholic way. At the moment the film starts, the flood will take its second step, burying underwater other 135 meters of Fengjie’s millenary History and of communities perplex with the urgency of leaving a town that has over two thousand years of tradition. His main character is back to his old flooded town in search of the wife he had left behind sixteen years before to look for work in a coal mine.
The same Jia Zhang-Ke presented at Venice 63 the documentary “Dong”, in great part a resgister of the changes in the underwater Three Gorges region. The documentary follows the magnificent work by painter Xiaodong, who registers in a rare way the misery of the group of workers facing this nature in a slow process of destruction. The second part of the documentary follows the painter to Bangkok where he is now going to work on his giant paintings with young women. What Xiaodong and Jia Zhang-Ke are seeking is the register of the inner miserable souls of the peoples of Asia, that from a distance of the west, are the paradigms of the progress we also want.
At last, an Italian film visits the same region in China to weep for this model of progress that destroys the best human feelings. “La Stella que non c’è/ The missing star”, is the new film by the Italian Gianni Amelio. He follows a worker of the Italian elite, unemployed since his steel factory was dismantled and sold to the Chinese. The specialized worker, member of a caste that is also disappearing in Italy, follows his steel plant to help his Chinese villains. He thinks the oven has a problem that can provoke an explosion and kill people. His trip to inner China uncovers a painful finding – that of a country of devastated lands, where human element is the one that seems to count less.
I tell Manoel de Oliveira the summary of the sad films I saw and he sentences fulminantly. “China is really destroying itself and destroying the world. It calls itself a communist country and there is nothing communist about it. It’s their way of enslaving people. They say they make progress, but they invade the world with cheap goods and spread more unemployment wherever they manage to sell what they produce.” Manoel de Oliveira is in Venice to present “Belle Toujours”, a continuation of “Belle de Jour”, made 40 years ago by Luis Buñuel. At almost 98 years of age (in December), Oliveira sentences: “I am preparing my next film. It will be about this progress that doesn’t exist. I’ve read a Spanish book which I liked very much and have already adapted it for the movies. It will be called MANIFEST AGAINST PROGRESS.”
Translation into English: Laura Rebessi (laurarebessi@gmail.com)
