The evening screening of Marco Bellocchio’s Vincere was an absolute clusterfuck of the highest order. I don’t know how the theater got as packed as it was but I know sure as the fucking nose on my face that the vast majority of the cunts and assholes seated in that theater were never at any point standing in either the ticket holder or pass holder lineups. Something is seriously fucking wrong with this picture. Fuckers. And you know none of these entitled bourgeois shits is in any way going to enjoy the new film by a Marxist filmmaker they have never heard of whose tactics they are going to find boring, tedious, and not a little discomfiting. I was barely able to get into the theater. I was literally the first person behind the admission cut-off point until I begged them to let me in. I told them I would happily sit in the front row. They let in ten of us. The theater was full except the front row. My A.A. buddy had tried to save me a seat but some false-haired old SoCal bitch with a face full of Botox nearly clawed him to death before he finally relinquished control of it. People were all pissed off that they didn’t have decent seats and were once again threatening to break into some kind of give-me-convenience-or-give-me-death riot. The poor fucking volunteers. I can only imagine the shit they’ve been taking all week from these country club swine. At least I got in. It was, after all, the film of the festival. A total, straight-up A #1 masterpiece to beat the band.
Nord
Norwegian director Rune Denstad Langlo’s bittersweet Nord is sadly not, as it turns out, a Louis-Ferdinand Céline adaptation. It is rather a not-exactly-a-road movie involving one man’s journey via skidoo and skis to visit the four-year-old son he’s just found out he has. It is one of those Northern European movies with dry-as-fuck humor, quirky-ass characters met en easy-does-it route, and so-unhip-that-it-is-in-fact-hip oompah music and big-band-variety bluegrass. It’s basically what would happen if you combined the aesthetic and temperament of filmmakers like either Kaurismäki brother or Fridrik Thor Fridriksson at his most whimsical and threw it half-assed at the basic storyline of David Lynch’s The Straight Story (’99) relocated to the snowbound hinterlands of mountainous northern Norway. The protagonist is Jomar, a booze-hound and nervous wreck, beset by anxiety attacks and not particularly inclined to get out of bed if he can help it. He is apparently the only employee of an out-of-the-way third rate ski lodge, though if it were up to him he’d still be back in the psych ward playing ping pong. Unfortunately for him the doctor in charge is steadfast in her conviction that it is about time that Jomar tried to get on with his life. An unexpected visit from an old friend – the dude who some years ago (I’m assuming four) took off with Jomar’s ex when she was finally fed up with his loafing – alerts our prospective hero to the existence of his son following some fisticuffs and consolatory hugs. Deciding that it is about time he shook things up a bit, Jomar burns down the ski lodge and heads off on a predictable if intermittently amusing picaresque adventure in search of booze, bonds, and redemption. Along the way he meets an assortment of loveable oddballs: a lonely girl in need of a friend who persuades her grandmother to let the husky interloper recuperate from snowblindness in a crawl space adjacent to her bedroom; a handsome and outspokenly homophobic young man (who perhaps doth protest too much if you catch my drift), left behind to tend to the homestead by parents who have left for Thailand in search of cures for their offsetting ailments (“cancer of the dick” in the father’s case), who has a nifty trick for an efficient drunk, learned from a Polish dude, involving shaving a patch off your head and taping an alcohol-saturated tampon to the bare spot (“it’s more like being stoned,” muses our hero re: the resultant buzz); and finally an old man ice-fishing on a frozen lake who has no intention of ever leaving the spot and probably should have thought twice before chaining himself to his snowmobile. Finally, the arduous final leg of the journey leads Jomar to the top of a mountain down which he skies in a beautiful shot in which the sky and the snow gauzily merge and the sense of release is palpable, this being a guy who has told us he used to love skiing but that it has long since quit doing it for him. Perhaps his journey has awoken in him a newfound appreciation for these small human pleasures. And perhaps that’s his son at the bottom of the mountain. Whatever. That’s it. That’s the whole movie. It’s 78 minutes long. I never would have guessed that it broke an hour. There’s not much to it and you’ve seen it all before. But it’s sweet. I laughed out loud a couple of times. It won the FIPRESCI Prize at the 2009 Berlin Film Festival, a prize traditionally given to fun-but-not-dumb crowd pleasers like, well, Nord. And Udo Kier seemed to like it. If you chuckle at the phrase “cancer of the dick,” then by all means! track this motherfucker down!
C+
Vincere
It turns out that crammed like a sardine into the middle of the front row directly at the base of the towering screen is a pretty kick-ass way to experience Bellocchio’s masterpiece. It were as though the film were straddling my chest and repeatedly pistol-whipping me with its exclamatory genius. Like a Straub-Huillet historical cine-tableau on crystal meth merged with an artillery shower of intertextual newsreel footage and fragments of other films (like Chaplin’s The Kid (’21) and Eisenstein’s Oktyabr (’28)), Vincere is a multivalent barrage serving to undermine the play of shadows and games of strategic omission that inform the way dominant history gets written and especially how it gets imaged, assimilating strategies from opera, fascist-futurist art, tabloids, costume drama, Soviet montage, and the aforementioned cinémathèque newsreels, in order to directly undercut the strategies of self-mythologizing, power-consolidating history-making of one prospective-media-baron-turned-intractable-imperial-despot (Mussolini), and to implicitly inform on another (why Mr. Berlusconi, bien sur). Vincere is a ruthlessly subversive-seditious film that not only frames a fascinating historical narrative but which simultaneously interrogates how the cinema and other cultural forms become accessories to crimes before, during, and after the fact. By putting the audience in a position of identification with Ida Dalser, the woman who loved and helped to make Benito Mussolini, who may have been his first wife and was certainly the mother of his firstborn son, and whose legacy is that of an individual not safely intelligible within the history-as-process-and-reproduction-of-its-own-limit, which she helps to set in motion, so is thus buried in a loony hatch, the film both forces us to identify with complicity in the manufacture of autocratic models and then with the helplessness of being crushed, muted, redacted by the draconian forces that we have helped to set in motion. This is a historical film that is unflappably told in the future-perfect tense. It is right now! And it is an absolute masterpiece. One which nobody saw coming from late-period Bellocchio or from contemporary cinema in general. We have so little to compare it to. There is the aforementioned connection to Straub and Huillet. Occasionally it looks somewhat like the most beautiful sections of Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley (’06). The acerbic appropriation of Soviet montage set to pounding, insistent silent cinema piano music on a few occasions brought to my mind Guy Maddin’s brilliant short The Heart of the World ('00). The guttersnipe pummeling also invokes the rat-a-tat-tat raised-fist journalismo of Sam Fuller. But nothing I have seen comes close to paralleling Vincere’s incendiary polyphony. It’s totally radical and out of this world. The title says it all: the fascist orthodoxy demands that the voice of power WIN. Bellocchio’s film doesn't just speak truth to power in its detailing of a buried treasure tale that the powers that be would rather we didn't know about. It undermines the whole semiotic apparatus and explodes the network from within. It's like a bomb. A bomb in the house of power!
A+
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