.jpeg)
Edinburgh Film Festival 2023 | #1
When I first went to the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 2018, it was June and the city was calm and quiet, and I remember feeling as if the crowds that built up around the Royal Mile and the Grassmarket were easy to slip away from, and some peace was never too far away. It’s been five turbulent years since then, and the festival is now held two months later in the year, in August, competing for space against a seemingly endless array of other festivals that all seem to take place in the city during the same four-week period in the summer. The calm and quiet of my first visit was this time replaced by near-total chaos, with every hideaway, every park, every alleyway filled with dozens and dozens of people gathered around to see something happen. Anything. A didgeridoo beatboxer opposite the entrance to Edinburgh Castle. A sword-swallower laying on a bed of nails outside the Scottish National Gallery. A toilet-paper juggler standing atop a precarious stack of IKEA tables in Princes Street Gardens. A hyperactive dancer performing a J-pop medley near the Palace of Holyroodhouse. A city so stacked with music and dance and performance at this time of year that it overflows from the bars and pubs and clubs and out into the cobbled streets and beyond. In August, everyone in Edinburgh seems to be outside and standing still, stuck endlessly in one place, watching and listening.
I’m not sure how cinema is supposed to contend with such mayhem, such an overwhelming array of louder options, and yet here we are. In the face of such congestion, and following the sudden collapse into administration of the Centre for the Moving Image, the operator of the festival, in October last year, the Edinburgh International Film Festival is somehow still here, holding firm, bringing cinema to the city once again. This is my fourth visit to the festival, but the first in which I’ve had to contend with the full cacophony of Edinburgh in August. In the five days I was in town, I saw 12 films: eight new features, three from the retrospective, and one, Christian Petzold’s Afire, that I’d already seen in Berlin and was curious to revisit. Even just a few months ago, it seemed as if the festival would never happen again. I was very glad to be there for its rebirth.
Among the necessarily truncated programme of feature films on offer this year, I was most excited to see Laura Citarella’s Trenque Lauquen, the latest work to emerge from El Pampero Cine, the production company and artist collective behind, among many others, Mariano Llinás’s La Flor and the work of Alejo Moguillansky. Trenque Lauquen is a two-part, four-hour mosaic about Laura, a mystery-loving botanist and part-time radio host, whose sudden disappearance baffles the men in her life, Chicho, a colleague, and Rafa, her boyfriend, both of whom are in love with her, and sets them on a meandering cross-country search to find her, or, at least, to find their own version of her. These two men drive from town to town, asking questions, following leads, and eventually hitting a dead end, before moving on to the next town down the road, again and again, searching in vain for some trace of Laura. Citarella frames this story in a dozen or so chapters, presented out of order, beginning with Rafa and Chicho’s search and gradually recontextualising it with new information and new obsessions: a mystery involving letters hidden in the pages of library books; a search for an unclassified species of orchid; a conspiracy surrounding a mysterious creature washed up on the shores of a lake. Time passes, and the film continues to shift and deepen, taking on layers of new detail that serve to cast a shadow over everything that came before. For Citarella, understanding is a futile game. Instead, Trenque Lauquen is a film about the limits of comprehension. Both Rafa and Chicho have decided that the Laura they know and love is the real version of Laura, whatever that means, when really the person they know only a small part of who she is. If they really knew everything about her, they’d know where she was. As with all the letters Laura found in the library books, it’s both easy and satisfying to take a set of (potentially incomplete) clues and use them to piece together a likely version of events, but that can never capture the totality of a story, a history, a life. It’s impossible to have all the facts, all the contexts, motivations. It’s impossible to truly know someone. All you can get is the version you’re most willing to believe in while the mysteries remain unsolved in the margins.
I’d be surprised if I see many films this year that have the same density and commitment to mystery as Trenque Lauquen, and while that wasn’t something I was particularly hoping for from the rest of the programme, the tidiness of some of the festival’s biggest titles seemed at odds with much of what made Citarella’s film so interesting to me. Both Ira Sachs’s Passages and Celine Song’s Past Lives feel dulled by the restrictive care with which their triangular relationships are constructed, and the inevitability with which they evolve and develop, while the ferocity of Daniel Bandeira’s Property, a survival thriller in which a farm-owner’s wife is trapped inside an armoured car after the workers take violent revenge after years of exploitation, is cheapened by the suspension of logic in key dramatic moments. Christian Petzold’s wonderful film Afire, on the other hand, is anything but obvious, and takes a similar approach to Trenque Lauquen, with a careful accumulation of information serving to disprove a solipsistic author’s assumptions about the world around him and force him, for better or for worse, to engage with the realities of his life. But of everything else at the festival, perhaps most interesting of all was Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up, a film actively fighting against restriction at every turn, and one that, somewhat belatedly, received its first UK screening here eighteen months after its premiere in Cannes.
Showing Up follows a week or so in the life of Lizzy, a sculptor and administrative assistant in Portland preparing for a solo exhibition of her work in a small gallery in the city. As the week progresses, Lizzy has to deal with the distractions of her day-to-day life as she tries to prioritise the completion of her own work: a hungry cat, her tense relationships with her separated parents and reclusive brother, the care required to nurse an injured pigeon back to health, the lack of hot water in her apartment, and her landlord, friend, and fellow artist’s refusal to help her as she prepares her own work for exhibition. These inconveniences serve as an incessant attack on Lizzy’s ability to create, but never malevolently so. It’s all just a symptom of the world in which she lives, a world that allows her to live the life she wants, but doesn’t necessarily value her work or respect her desire to create it. Reichardt contrasts Lizzy’s life with other people’s perceptions of success and talent around her, but never towards her: her friend and landlord is staging two celebrated shows at the same time; her increasingly detached brother is seen by her parents as a misunderstood genius while they seem to have no opinion of her work at all. Even her workplace, the Oregon College of Art and Craft, seems to be against her, with several cut-aways showing students given the space and time to develop their art in their own way without the burden of responsibility, while Lizzy, no longer a student, is only able to give the required time to her work at home, and is only able to use the kiln at the college, a required tool in the completion of her sculptures, with the assistance and permission of a colleague. And yet she keeps working because that’s what she wants to do. It’s worth it for Lizzy. Showing Up is about finding ways to do what you love, and to go and make it happen in spite of every possible reason not to. The art itself can be angry on your behalf, as it should be, but it has to be there to begin with. It has to exist. If ever there was an ethos for the new-look Edinburgh International Film Festival, it would have to be something like that.