My association with for this year's LFF began with a pleasant surprise: hosting two screenings of Terraferma, the new film by Emanuele Crialese, the Italian director of Nuovomondo (Golden Door, 2006). I saw the film in Venice, and, though it's incredibly atmospheric and beautiful, I wasn't altogether wild about the rather earnest story, in which a family on a small Sicilian island are confronted with the ugly realities of illegal immigration. In fact, personally, I thought the theme was somewhat more successfully handled by Aki Kaurismaki's offbeat Cannes hit Le Havre, which, for reasons I'm not quite sure of, managed to bypass the LFF. However, since he was unable to come, Crialese sent in his place two of his cast – Donatella Finocchiaro and Martina Codecasa. As you'll see from this clip here, this was a good move; both of these smart, funny women proved to be fantastic ambassadors for the film.
Finocchiaro plays Giulietta, the mother in Terraferma; in the film, it is revealed that her family have traditionally fished for survival, but Giulietta argues that tourism is the way forward. She rents their house out to some travelling mainlanders, the Milanese Maura (Codecasa) and her two male friends, and pushes her naïve son Filippo (Crialese regular Filippo Pucillo) into their orbit. Filippo asks Maura out on a date, and to say it doesn't go well is an understatement: they sail to sea in a glass-bottomed boat and are besieged by African immigrants swimming to shore. Filippo panics and, fearing the boat will capsize (which it certainly will) batters them with whatever is to hand. Filippo, who has helped his grandfather to rescue a handful of illegals just a few days earlier, is stricken with guilt. The police insist that no one is to be taken ashore, but the reality is that people are drowning by the dozen, transported in tiny boats that barely, and rarely, make the distance.
The politics of the film are timely and admirable, and Terraferma recently made the cut as Italy's official entry for the foreign-language Oscar stakes. But after feeling a little hit over the head by the film's seriousness and moralism, I was interested to hear Finocchiaro and Codecasa discuss the shooting of the movie, in particular the work that was done to set up the distinction between the provincial locals and the worldly Maura. Even in its smaller moments, the film is about insiders and outsiders, and I began to see that Crialese had a wider net to cast than I first realised. Also, Crialese had used non-professionals who had survived such journeys, and both actresses were sobering and humble with their recollections of scenes that skewed scarily close to the reality experienced by their colleagues.
The next morning I moderated a press conference for Shame, from which you can watch selected highlights here. I've run into Michael Fassbender a few times on my recent, never-ending festival tour, and it's been great to see that his loyalty to director Steve McQueen, and the film, hasn't faded or caused him to become glib and jaded. What you won't see from this clip is McQueen's famous bluntness, which erupted twice; first, he refused to answer a question he didn't understand (until it was politely rephrased for him), and secondly, when asked about the politics of male nudity, he snapped, “I don’t want to get into this conversation. It doesn’t make sense and I don’t want to give too much of my brain to it. Talking about nonsense doesn’t help me.” I think that's where I got a laugh by saying (something deadpan, like), “And that seems like a good place to end,” rather than the robotic, “...And thank you for attending,” that you'll see on the video. Offstage, Fassbender was his usual polite self, and perhaps I can start an internet rumour here now by saying that when I asked if we might be seeing him in Quentin Tarantino's forthcoming Django Unchained, well, he certainly didn't say yes, but it wasn't a big emphatic no either. So let's wait and see.
After that, my next port of call, on the first Saturday of the festival, was Oren Moverman's cop drama Rampart, which I like very much and wrote about here. That day I went to speak to Woody Harrelson at Claridge's, and it's no understatement to say that we got on famously. I use that word advisedly since famousness became a theme of the festival; I didn't get to meet Madonna at the next week's screening of WE, but I can say that, at the party for Rampart, at the Soho House, after a great chat with The Guard director John McDonagh and his partner Lizzie, I seemed to make a new best friend in REM's Michael Stipe. I say “seemed to” because. although Stipe was very modest, amiable and polite, I can't remember anything we talked about. I wish I could say similar, modest things about myself: the day's conversation with Harrelson had gone very well, and I still have flashbacks to the horrified looks on my friends' faces as I tried to pluck them from their comfy conversations, exhorting, in all star-struck seriousness, “COME AND TALK TO WOODY!!!!!” Still, he didn't mind*.
As always happens at the LFF I had my Nordics, which this year came down to two films: Árni Ásgeirsson's Undercurrent (Brim), from Iceland, and Morten Tyldum's Headhunters (Hodejegerne), from Norway. Undercurrent is the underdog of the two, but that doesn't mean it's the lesser film, just that it won't get any thing like the same push here that Headhunters is getting. Ásgeirsson's film (below) is actually a very good character piece about the crew of a fishing boat whose lives are thrown into turmoil by the suicide of a fellow sailor. It begins with his death, and very little comment is originally made on it, but slowly Ásgeirsson's film reveals itself as a very clever ghost story – not that there's anything at all supernatural about it, it's just that, in the way that Ingmar Bergman's films used to unwind, the spectre of the past continues to impact on the present. I liked it a lot, in part because its performances are very real and subtle – mostly by members of the Vesturport theatre group – but also because Ásgeirsson creates an incredibly tactile sense of the danger that's faced by the kind of people who are willing to take on such tough, low-paid, desperately lonely work. He told me that some of the more extreme scenes were cheated with wind and rain machines, but there's still a breathtaking authenticity to the rolling waves and an astonishing commitment from the cast.
Headhunters (above), though, is a much more obviously entertaining film. It's based on Jo Nesbo's novel of the same name, and the time is definitely right for its garish sense of high adventure. Thankfully, Tyldum's film does not follow in the slipstream of the increasingly stuffy Girl With The Dragon Tattoo Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest And Played With Fire (But Digressed In Lots Of Rambling Subplots In The Course Of Three Films And Seven Hours). Instead, it is a flashy, funny and not altogether serious action thriller that in some ways resembles Martin Scorsese's After Hours, since it depicts a professional man's unravelling in a very short space of time. This (equally short) man is Roger Brown (Aksel Hennie), a professional headhunter – as in job recruitment – who doubles as an art thief. Brown has a beautiful artist wife whom he thinks is only with him because of his money, and so he is forced into finding bigger heists in order to fund his lifestyle. This is why his interest is piqued by a chance encounter with Danish businessman Clas Greve (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), who claims to own a rare painting by Rubens. Brown goes after it, but the hunter soon becomes the hunted in this well-made, far-fetched and endearingly light-hearted romp, built around a wildly committed performance from Hennie, the most tortured leading man since Laurent Lucas in 2004's Calvaire.
That pretty much summed up the first seven days of LFF2011. Coming next: dinner with Harry Belafonte, lunch (not naked) with David Cronenberg… and Michael Shannon's colon.
* I hope.
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