Locarno was a tricky festival to navigate. Usually, when I attend a festival, I’m forced to keep my eye on the newest titles and open my ears to the latest buzz, retooling my schedule on the fly to catch a film I may not find again. But because of the Columbia retrospective series—I will write about that terrific assemblage of films in greater depth soon—I immediately had fewer slots to dedicate to newer works. That meant being a little less adventurous than usual to cover the must-watch films from directors like Wang Bing, Radu Jude, and Hong Sang-soo. And while this dispatch is filled with three competition titles, one from an aforementioned director, I’m glad I was ultimately able to include a smaller but no less imperative film too.
But for now, I can’t figure out which is more impressive, writer/director Hong Sang-soo’s tidal wave of output or its consistent quality. “By the Stream,” the Korean auteur’s second premiere of 2024—the Isabelle Huppert starring “A Traveler’s Needs” debuted this year at the Berlinale—is a continuation of his impressive streak. The sobering film features many of his hallmarks: dialogue-heavy scenes, conversations set to the sipping of tea, and a lens that strips his characters of the little artifice they entered the story with.
The film’s premise is unsurprisingly simple: It’s been years since retired actor and current bookstore owner Sieon (Kwon Hae-hyo) has seen his niece Jeonim (Kim Min-hee)—Sieon had a falling out with Jeonim’s mother that is forced in, almost haphazardly, by Hong late in the film—but ventures to the university where she teaches at her request. She needs someone to write and direct a play for a group of students whose previous director was embroiled in several sexual relationships with his women actors, which turned sour. Having said that, Jeonim’s boss, Jeong (Cho Yun-hee), is immediately infatuated with Sieon, and her affection is just as quickly returned. She remembers his acting days and compliments the stoutness he still possesses.
While the scenes between Sieon and Jeong are touching and giddy, sketching an autumnal relationship between two people still hoping to feel butterflies, the sequences featuring Sieon and Jeonim are distinctly different. While Sieon seems quite content with himself, shuffling through life with a soft chuckle, Jeonim, an art teacher, appears to be ruminating about a potential crossroad in her life.
Curiously, the film’s emotional heft isn’t found during the mounting of the play. Rather, it often occurs around mid-afternoon meals as crisp leaves fall from slumbering trees—reservoirs of emotion stream outward, revealing long-suppressed regrets and desires. Kim, who took home Locarno’s acting prize, is especially adept during the final meal, holding back Jeonim’s hurt and anger before once more removing herself from the world. Similar to “By the Stream,” she remains distant and low-key, to the point of being impossible to perceive. That slipperiness doesn’t always work for “By the Stream,” but when it does, it should be nourishing enough to be happily consumed by fans of the auteur.
While the Locarno competition featured an impressive array of seasoned directors, it was Saulė Bliuvaitė‘s unsparing but heavy-handed feature directorial debut, “Toxic,” that was the big winner, walking away with the Golden Leopard. The Lithuanian urban coming-of-age film has a gritty story to tell of two girls: Marija (Vesta Matulytė) and Kristina (Ieva Rupeikaitė)—who begin as rivals before forming an unbreakable bond.
It helps that both are outsiders. A 13-year-old Marija, who lumbers with a limp, has recently arrived to live with her grandmother while her mother gets situated in a new city. Marija’s limp and blankness make her an immediate target of bullying. In the film’s opening scene, Kristina and her friends have swiped Marija’s jeans, causing Marija to leap at Kristina in the girl’s lockerroom. Despite her obvious confidence, however, Kristina isn’t widely liked. She is mostly viewed as a tomboy living with a father who routinely pays his daughter to go outside so he can knock boots with his girlfriend. It’s under the latter situation, whereby Marija ventures to Kristina’s house for her jeans, disrupting the dad’s foreplay with his lover, that the two girls become friends. The girls grow even closer through their shared modeling aspirations—both see the local agency as their ticket away from this dead-end town, but only Marija, despite her limp, catches the eye of the talent agent.
“Toxic” is a handsomely mounted picture that renders this nondescript town’s industrial surroundings with some manufactured beauty. It’s also intent on showing all the ways these young girls are left vulnerable to predatorial boys, harmful beauty standards that wreak havoc on their bodies, and the hopelessness that pervades a town with seemingly no aspirational careers or adults to speak of. The film is mostly an endless stream of exploitative acts hoisted upon Marija and Kristina that often sacrifices any attempt at exploring their inner lives. To a point, the latter is intended—after all, their world only takes a surface interest in them.
Still, in what ways does “Toxic” play any differently than any other poverty porn narrative about hard times in hard places, weighing the portrayal of the bleakest nightmares over fully building out its characters? While “Toxic” warns you what it’s about through its title, you come to wish the resulting film was a little less obvious and a little less common.
Locarno’s other Lithuanian film veers closer to melodrama yet somehow feels more grounded than “Toxic.” Laurynas Bareisa’s “Drowning Dry” is another spin into the world of MMA, detailing a trip taken by a hulking fighter named Lukas (Paulius Markevicius) with his wife Ernesta (Gelmine Glemzaite) and their young son to a lakeside house. Accompanying them are Ernesta’s sister Juste (Agne Kaktaite), her husband Tomas (Giedrius Kiela) and their daughter. There’s envy on both sides of the family: Despite his fighting success, Lukas and Ernesta are too broke to buy a house—a reality that varies greatly from the well-off Juste and Tomas. Still, Tomas often feels emasculated around the sculpted Lukas, challenging Lukas to a pitiful athletic duel and buying an oversized pick-up truck to bolster his self-confidence.
Even with these petty battles, the country house is serene, and the two families appear to genuinely care for each other. So when tragedy strikes at the lake, Tomas playfully throws Ernesta’s niece in the lake, only to see her disappear in the water—it pierces through the film’s breezy rhythm. From that moment on, “Drowning Dry” becomes a different, more elusive film by switching to non-linear storytelling.
Whether Ernesta’s niece survived is an open question. And the lingering effects of another tragedy also arise in a later timeline. Scenes from the past seemingly repeat themselves, with several details altered. In one timeline, for instance, Ernesta and Juste dance to Donna Lewis’s’ “I Will Always Love You”; in another, they groove to Lighthouse Family’s High. The crisscrossing of memories, some warped by grief, adds further textures to two broken families working to find some way forward beyond their shared paralysis. It’s a fascinating bit of emotional excavation, which could’ve played slightly more unyielding earlier in the film. Still, “Drowning Dry” is an absorbing and intensely conceived story that acutely dramatizes the difficulty of overcoming a sudden loss.
Usually, these dispatches stop at three films, but since my last Radu Jude dispatch only featured two titles, I figured I was owed one. I also couldn’t imagine leaving Locarno without giving “When the Phone Rang” its flowers. Serbian writer/director Iva Radivojević’s third feature is a stunning attempt to translate the pain felt by forced migration through the eyes of a child. Guided by the voice of an off-screen narrator (Slavica Bajčeta), the film, which premiered in the festival’s Concorso Cineasti del Presente competition, begins in 1992 with a phone call at 10:36 am announcing to Lana (Natalija Ilinčić) the death of her grandfather. To the young Lana, the tragic call marks a permanent change in her life—it’s the beginning of the long war in Yugoslavia.
Subsequent calls over the course of days, weeks, and seemingly months announce several other life-altering events while providing a fuller picture of Lana. She becomes obsessed with a local glue-sniffing dropout named Vlada (Vasilije Zečević), finds solace and fun with her neighbor Jova (Anton Augustin), loses friends, and learns family secrets involving her father and grandfather.
Radivojević has a commanding vision for this story, acting as writer, producer, editor, art director, and composer. Cinematographer Martin DiCicco bolsters Radivojević’s storytelling through his plaintive use of 16mm photography, which adds a dreamlike quality to the nightmarish reality. Apart from the film’s controlled visual and aural form, “When the Phone Rang” lacks a sense of time. That is by design. Like leaves dancing across the grass, the blowing out of a child’s memory reveals much through its seeming randomness. The feeling of place is singular, demarking what will be lost. The phone that seems to ring at the exact time every Friday is the invasion into her life that seems to have happened without reason.
Ilinčić as Lana is uncommonly assured throughout the picture, conjuring an entire people’s pain, disbelief, and worry through the subtlest of expressions. While the 72-minute runtime is perfectly charted, you get the sense that this could’ve been three hours long, and there still wouldn’t have been a wasted second. That is the sure-handedness by Lana and the adeptness of Radivojević. “When the Phone Rang” is the kind of small, smartly crafted film that feels revelatory and life-changing without ever devolving into platitudes.
