SOGGY TIMES IN LOCARNO

As I've written before, there’s something special about the Locarno Film Festival. Set on Lake Maggiore and surrounded by forested peaks, the town’s 8,000-seat Piazza Grande is one of the world’s great open-air arenas, and the main spot for the festival's 11-night programme. But there’s something even more special about Locarno: the rain.

This is my third year at Locarno, and each of my visits has been devastated at some point by a deluge. Locarno is supposedly Switzerland's sunniest city, yet by the fifth night this year the Piazza Grande had already been evacuated twice. On the third night, just as the piazza’s bell-tower clock struck 9.30pm--the time each screening starts--giant globs of water started to fall. Within 15 minutes Nick Cassavetes’s weepy “My Sister’s Keeper”, a film about a teenage girl dying from leukemia, faced stiff competition from a sky spitting electricity and chucking down rain with hurricane ferocity. The storm could be watched from beneath the piazza’s arches, as could, with a cricked neck, the film.

After steady rain through the night, Saturday afternoon brightened up. But Sunday evening offered a repeat of Friday: this time the rain-drenched film was “Les Derniers jours du monde” (Last Days on Earth), a ludicrous, rampaging, apocalyptic flick starring the generally excellent Matthieu Amalric. Never has a Piazza Grande title more unfortunately predicted Locarno’s weather.

The festival is always a good-natured affair, but I couldn’t help but notice a note of gloom. The best competition entry I've seen so far is Quebecois Bernard Émond’s “La Donation” (The Legacy), the final film in a brooding, moving and distinctly funerary trilogy based on faith, hope and charity. Another widely talked about film is the Swiss-French “Complices” (Partners), a slick sexy and tough work that begins with death: a mangled body of a boy prostitute in the Rhône.

It is not that Locarno is beginning to resemble the doom-riddled Venice of Nicholas Roeg’s 1973 masterpiece “Don’t Look Now”, but the theme of endings persists. The festival’s popular artistic director, Frédéric Maire, leaves this year to head the Swiss film archive. He will be replaced by Olivier Père, a Parisian.

Père insisted that the Swiss had welcomed his appointment warmly when I spoke to him before he moved off, alone and incognito, into the Locarno night. But I did overhear mutterings about likely changes to the Piazza Grande, such as making screenings there less conspicuously crowd-pleasing. Whether Monsieur Père can also inaugurate a new Locarno era with a Wimbledon-like retractable roof over the piazza is quite another matter. (Surely Roger Federer, the mightiest Swiss of our times, would approve.)

Festival del film Locarno continues until August 15th.

~ JAMES WOODALL

Picture credit: MaximeF (via Flickr)