“Sica” confronts adolescent fragility with adventure and tragedy on the Costa da Morte

The film about adolescence, which is always more turbulent than moderate, is a genre in itself and is increasingly visited, partly related to the greater weight gained by the gaze of women in authorship. And it is precisely in this territory of the search as the epicenter (the search for self-knowledge and the literal search for finding someone lost) that he finds himself with precise ideas. sisa Galician-Catalan production by director Carla Subirana (Barcelona, ​​​​​​​​1972), which was shown this Sunday in the Generation section of the 73rd Berlinale.

If the landscape in cinema is often a character with its own life and interaction in the development of the plot, in sis the climatic harshness of the Costa da Morte occupies a leading role shared only by the role of the young Thai García Blanco, a non-professional actress who here reveals herself as the ephemeral face of fragility. Because the young woman to whom he gives life is maintained in a painful balance characteristic of a time of all doubts. An insecurity, in her case, compounded by her discomfort with the untamed nature of the sea that had stolen her father, the missing sailor.

For this reason, Subirana deals with the struggle between two obstinacy, two forces of nature: that of the uncontrollable violence of the water hitting the rocks, which takes lives as an assumed tithe. And the second, inflexible will to fight, that of a sailor’s daughter who defies the passing days and the ravages of the tide or the predicted storm. He is still waiting for the sea to return the body of the drowned.

It is a tragic duel that in sis breathes like a true struggle between the roundness of the ocean and the deceptive fragility of the reed of the Thai García Blanco, whose angry look does not agree with either the confusion or the materialistic and debatable response of her mother, who tries to calm this lawsuit without success. girl with the storm or with the gods.

In the alliance between this natural heroine and another child, who is encouraged as a storm chaser, Carla Subirana puts together a very beautiful tandem of a pure adventure film that can only be imagined from that source of age where your whole life before you gives you the right to feel indestructible. It’s that beautiful challenge that coexists in the film with the bleak, almost bleak background and curtains of tides and fog. That monster that does not forgive the sacrifice of life in barter that becomes the law of iron or fog.

From the modulation and naive authenticity of her young natural actors – together with professional names such as the Catalan Núria Prims -, Carla Subirana refines this coming of age presented in the section Generation, a careful reserve of films about children or adolescents, from which a few years ago came out the laureate no less than Carla Simón and her summer of 1993.

The French Legion and the dubious power of “Disco Boy”

In the official part, this Berlinale continues to surprise with films of a very strong visual and dramatic charge, but which at the same time possess a dark or, at least, murky ideological core. It happened this Saturday with a brutal manodrome and it happened again with Disco Boythe French-Italian film and feature debut of Giacomo Abbruzzese.

It is a film of undeniable influence and composition of atmosphere and structure. In a frenetic rhythm, it immerses you in the European border of illiberal Poland, where two Belarusians disguised as hooligans whose final destination is the dream of France.

You are suddenly faced with the fact that if you manage to survive the swimming part of the river Oder and reach Germany, in France the Foreign Legion is waiting with open arms for all kinds of criminals, neo-Nazis, mercenaries without any papers to do dirty work in wars on the African continent. And in exchange they show you a carrot or a Dorad of French nationality. And the right to put two glasses of Bordeaux on the table every afternoon.

Thus, a character with Franz Rogowski, a German actor who, along with Mads Mikelsen, is a big name in current European cinema, arrives in that paramilitary squad. That choice is not innocent. Because Rogowski embodies that ultra-Belarusian, a veteran with hands already stained with blood in the service of Wagner’s butchering Russians. You hallucinate to see such a figure present to you as the superhero of the story. And how his movements in the Niger Delta resemble those of Schwarzenegger in Predator.

Meanwhile, the armed movements of Africans who fight in a thousand guerillas to defend their territory from neo-colonialism are drawn as caricatures. It’s all so cheesy that those British films from the 1950s, when Africa was still Her Majesty’s territory and in which the Mau Mau independence fighters were portrayed as terrifying zombies, are nothing compared to this. Disco Boy.

Ah, the film bears that title because legionnaires in the middle of the jungles of civil war Nigeria find techno clubs with an original soundtrack by the electronic giant Vitalico. This torrent of evil cinema, but with an irresistible stage penetration, leads the very modern and amoral – or unconscious to pathological extremes – Giacomo Abbruzzese from militaristic hyperrealism towards the terrain of unreality, black magic or disco-dance magic. eroticism or the magic of women with their simple skin color. And he promptly washes his hands, just like his protagonist, a Belarusian kidnapped by a voodoo cabaret. The least is that on the way we saw how Franz Rogowski left a black mau mau’s severed head in a swamp on the Niger River. Next please.

“Past Lives”, flawless but “cool” comedy

Also in competition, an American film Past lives It came with thunderous echoes of what swept the Sundance festival a few weeks ago. Whenever this happens, you find yourself with all the VAT or hype that you have to take away what the thing is really worth. The film, director Celine Song’s debut, is a worthy romantic comedy with a bitter aftertaste. But it doesn’t break the ceiling.

It tells about how two Korean kids were separated while they were experiencing their unique first love at the age of fifteen. She leaves the country with her intellectual parents, and the boy stays in Seoul with his clothes. Fifteen years later, they meet again thanks to Facebook. She aspires to be a great writer, and he was engaged in engineering. But despite declassification the magic continues.

The woman, more pragmatic, decides to do it break another fifteen years. The third time, they finally meet again in New York. As she is married, we attend a manage a trois an emotional one that, by the way, puts the American husband to the test and shows us that he is already very understanding and applied in terms of the new masculinity. As it has to be. Pure Sundance, all strong cool, with a laboratory script that combines good comedic gags with a touch of melodrama that will work very well once the world gets to know it. It is impeccable, it is reasonably enjoyed. But save yourself the election campaign.

The competition day was completed by a film by the very veteran German director Margaretha von Trott. It is titled Ingeborg Bachmann and it is a walk through life and a bite through the work of one of the most famous poets of the German language of the 20th century.

It was very scary because we already know that Von Trotta has been dedicated to filming exemplary lives for years. We have already been martyred by Hannah Arendt, Ingmar Bergman, Hildegard von Bingen and Rosa Luxemburg. They are superficial excursions, without any depth, fluffy films told in such a way as to leave the viewer feeling that he is an expert in Heideggerian philosophy, when in fact what they have done to him is almost Save me of life figures, on the other hand. Ingeborg Bachmann that’s exactly it.

It is more important for her to get into the intimacy of the open relationship between the poetess and Max Frisch or to record the sexual foursome in pastel colors that the poetess organized with three Egyptians in the desert, than to make an effort to cut Bachmann’s thought or poetry. Of course, when quoting, the phrase that generates provocation is very well chosen: “Fascism is basically a marriage between men and women.” Well, Margarethe von Trotta, you were great.

It’s painful to retire when your fame is reduced to two films from the seventies as they were The lost honor of Katharine Blum and German sisters. He did not hesitate then to tackle, indeed bravely, the issue of the armed Baader-Meinhoff gang. But if you don’t go, at least make a biopic about Engelbert Humperdinck or Frank Beckenbauer. And leave the culture alone.