The retrospective in Bologna impressively demonstrated the quality of Mitchell Leisen’s direction; his films remain a cinematic delight. They have aged beautifully and leave no doubt as to why it is worth rediscovering an almost forgotten director from Hollywood’s golden age for a wider audience.
Another rediscovery focused on the Spanish director Juan Antonio Bardem, an uncle of the Spanish star Javier Bardem. Together with Luis García Berlanga, he helped Spanish cinema gain international recognition in the 1950s. Muerte de un ciclista (Death of a Cyclist, 1955) is regarded as his masterpiece and won the FIPRESCI Critics’ Prize at Cannes. The state censorship board reluctantly gave the film a 16+ rating, whilst the Catholic Church classified it as “gravemente peligrosa” (extremely dangerous). This is hardly surprising, considering that the film centres on a couple who, whilst out on a day trip, hit a cyclist and flee the scene for fear that their affair might become exposed.
Maria (Lucia Bosé) is married into Madrid’s high society, Juan (Alberto Closas) works as a professor at the university. While she is being blackmailed by a sleazy journalist, he is tormented by mounting pangs of conscience when he reads in the newspaper that the cyclist has died. Bardem combines social commentary with elements of a thriller to create a claustrophobic melodrama. The characters are trapped in a web of lies and conventions that is tightening around them. Some of the locations are particularly noteworthy, such as the landscape where the accident takes place and the area around the university, which were prominent locations during the Civil War. Although the war ended 16 years ago, a sense of repression hangs over Spanish society like a dark shadow.
The atmosphere in Bardem’s famous social and character study Calle Mayor (Main Street, 1956) is also claustrophobic; the film is set in a provincial Spanish town and was shot in Palencia, Cuenca and Logroño. Thirty-five-year-old Clara (Betsy Blair) experiences the narrow confines of the small town as a prison. For an unmarried woman, walks along the Calle Mayor in the company of her mother and attending Sunday mass are the only opportunities to leave the house. The neighbours pityingly mock her as an ‘old maid’. Until one day Juan (José Suárez) turns up and pays her compliments. Clara is over the moon and hopes for a future together, but Juan’s declarations of love are just a cruel prank he has thought up with his drinking mates to make fun of Clara.
With a severity similar to that in Muerte de un ciclista, Bardem dissects the stifling atmosphere of post-war Francoist Spain. The Catholic Church reigns unchallenged as the supreme moral authority, granting different freedoms to men and women. Men can go to a brothel on a Saturday evening just as naturally as they can go to church on a Sunday morning. For women, Sunday mass is the only option. The casting of the American actress Betsy Blair as ‘Clara’ is particularly interesting. In the US, she had just enjoyed great success starring alongside Ernest Borgnine in Marty. Due to her communist sympathies, she was forced to leave the country and settled in England, where she married the director Karel Reisz. Juan Antonio Bardem was arrested during filming, but Betsy Blair refused to continue working with another director. When Calle Mayor was invited to Venice, the Spanish authorities refused to approve the film and only relented when the French co-producer threatened to submit it as a French production. Calle Mayor was eventually screened to great acclaim in Venice and enjoyed international success.
Bologna is also an ideal place to revisit classics from the recent past, such as Boogie Nights (1995), an early and brilliant film by Paul Thomas Anderson, who has just triumphed at the Oscars with One Battle After Another. Anderson takes us back to the San Fernando Valley of the 1970s, when classic porn films were still shot on 16mm there. Alongside Burt Reynolds, the film features a host of young actors who went on to become stars: Julianne Moore as the female lead and Reynolds’s love interest, Philip Seymour Hoffman as a gay sound engineer, and John C. Reilly and Mark Wahlberg at the start of their careers. In Boogie Nights, Wahlberg's character experiences a meteoric rise from waiter to porn star Dirk Diggler. They drink margaritas, jump into the pool and soak up the Californian sun. Who wouldn’t have loved to be there? Yet the unstoppable success of the new video format – which Burt Reynolds, as director, dismisses as low-quality rubbish – heralds the end of the ‘honest’ porn film business.
Another highlight was a masterclass at the Modernissimo cinema with the Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho, who spoke about his time as a film critic. At festivals such as Cannes and Venice, he had asked his interviewees – around 70 critics and directors from Brazil, the USA and Europe – what they thought about the state of cinema in relation to art, audiences and criticism. The resulting documentary Critico was screened as part of the event. Kleber Mendonça Filho is now one of Brazil’s best-known filmmakers on the international stage. Most recently, he won the Best Director Award at Cannes, a Golden Globe for Secret Agent, and also received an Oscar nomination.
Another tribute was paid to the Franco-Swiss actress Irène Jacob, who rose to international fame for her leading role in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s La Double Vie de Véronique (The Double Life of Véronique, 1991) and was awarded the Best Actress prize at Cannes. In Bologna, she presented the third film in Kieslowski’s ‘Colours’ trilogy, Trois Couleurs: Rouge (Three Colours: Red, 1995). She plays the student Valentine, who encounters an elderly, embittered judge (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who eavesdrops on his neighbours’ telephone conversations and shocks her with his cynical remarks. ‘Red’ is regarded as the cinematic high point of Kieslowski’s ‘Colours’ trilogy, a sophisticated interplay of chance encounters, parallels and voyeuristic observations, in which the old judge, like a merciless god, holds the threads of fate in his hands. Nevertheless, something like a tentative friendship develops between the young student and the old man, in keeping with the theme of brotherhood expressed in the triad of republican ideals: ‘Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité’.
Kiéslowski subtly weaves together different themes and narrative levels to form a dense, dramatic tapestry. “It is a film about fate and chance, loneliness and communication, cynicism and faith, doubt and longing,” as the English critic Geoff Andrew writes, concluding:
“Breathtakingly beautiful, accompanied by a powerful score, perfectly acted and utterly flawless, the film ranks amongst the greatest cinematic achievements of recent decades. A masterpiece.” No wonder that, even 30 years on, Three Colours: Red does not seem to have aged at all, but feels timeless.
Irène Jacob describes her experience working with Kieslowski as follows: “The camera was like a microscope. Krzysztof was always very close to the action and extremely precise in his instructions. He didn’t discuss things beforehand, but worked exclusively on set. He liked to rehearse just before a take, if at all.”
At the end of the film, the ferry on which Valentine is travelling to join her boyfriend in England is caught in a storm and sinks. On the news, the judge sees that, apart from her, the protagonists of the other films, Three Colours: Blue and Three Colours: White, have also been rescued. This rescue stands in stark contrast to the ending of Kieslowski’s earlier film Przypadek (Perhaps a Coincidence, 1981/87), in which three storylines culminate in a plane crash in which all the characters lose their lives.
Three Colours: Red was not only the final film in the Colour Trilogy but also Kiéslowski’s last film. He died two years later, aged 54, undergoing heart surgery.
Once again, Bologna proves itself to be a place where old and new classics come together and inspire one another. A cornucopia of film history from which the audience can help themselves, returning home richly rewarded.