![]() Part of the pleasure, of course, is seeing these actors have at it, Rostislav Plyatt's burly, irrepressible (but also indiscriminate) warmth and his comic intrusions make for an affable character, but such scenes as his remarkable memory of a battle anecdote from the war had us all holding our breath at the sudden, soulful tremors of history. The old World War 2 veteran's incessant, warm oversharing meets its match in the disinterest of this male epitome of his daughter's generation, and as days and nights seem to swim by, Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel is suggested in the inability for this new kind of Soviet yuppie to get rid of the kind of man who came before him. Yet Khutsiev is more than up to this challenge, turning what could have been something stagey and theatrical (especially as Epilogue feature a well-known theatre actor as the babbling, comically invasive father-in-law) into something with far more expansive implications, as a series of ellipses blur just how long the old man stays with his son-in-law who receives his wife's father with barely hidden coolness and only increases in impatience and flights of antipathy. For a director I've now associated through such films as I Am Twenty, July Rain and Infinitas as having a freely roving vision, it was a bit of surprise to encounter this chamber drama, which has echoes of Bergman's more confined, dreamlike films. No better double feature could be imagined than following No Home Movie with Marlen Khutsiev's 1983 film, his first in color, Epilogue(also known as Afterword), an adaption of a three page magazine story wherein a man's provincial father-in-law visits his Moscow apartment while his wife, the man's daughter, is away. Nevertheless, much of it is felt in the absences in the vacated images, in the tottering mother's isolation, in the sense that Akerman herself is not fully connected to this woman, her history and her home. Her mother's time in Auschwitz is mentioned, as is Chantal's rejected Orthodox Jewish upbringing and her family's flight from Poland to Belgium, yet after all this lived history so little of it we see on screen in this woman's home. The mother's flat feels temporary, a large, impersonal space filled with very personal decor, and so Akerman's records of its rooms and doors, of her conversations with her mother about her past, and of her mother's movement around the space, feels transient, temporarily inhabited, a holding place before a transition to somewhere else. "I want to show how small the world is," the director replies, her mother not understanding. "Your camera, every time," her mother cluckingly, affectionately nags, when Akerman calls her only to reveal not her face in the Skype frame but her face covered by a giant digital camera, recording her mother's blurred image, at once distant and close. This false home, shadow shrouded, becomes a chamber not just of interrogation but of self-interrogation, one that brings dreams (seen as old movie footage), longing, and turmoil upon our heroine, and that forces her to re-think living in the world outside her radically refashioned "home." Except, of course, all that is fake and the interior of that falseness is a burning question of how one actualizes one's politics, how far you take your beliefs, what you are willing to do and why. In other words, pretend she is living a normal domestic life. We see the mostly male group care for and interrogate the man, but our true protagonist and moral guide is the gang's sole female accomplice (the magnificent Maya Sansa) who has to build a false kind of home in this apartment: choose the flat, move into it, decorate, clean, live with the men, care for this elderly captive, and fake to neighbors and others that she is married, with child, and so on. The homage to the director has only just begun here, and is being led by 2003's Good Morning, Night, a rich, sequestered look at the political terror of Italy's Red Brigade in the 1970s in the form of a chamber drama of false domesticity: a small cadre of the terrorist revolutionaries kidnap former Christian Democrat Prime Minister Aldo Moro and hold him for hostage exchange in a generic Roman apartment. Bellocchio's latest film will premiere later this month in Venice, but Locarno has something just as good if not better: three 35mm prints from the director's last decade of work, plus a new restoration of 1965's I pugni ni tasca. After Michael Cimino, the other Leopard of Honor the festival was bestowing this year is to another maverick of his nation, Italian master Marco Bellocchio.
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