Locarno 2025 Locarno Film Festival: Blue Heron, Dracula, Legend of the Happy Worker | Festivals and awards

The Locarno Film Festival continues to surprise me. The eclectic programming means that you never see two films that look alike. In this dispatch, for example, three works that could not be more different: a film from adulthood, a burning criticism of the AI and a Worldback Western. And although I recommend all these photos to various degrees, I am not sure to recommend to anyone who looks consecutive back from back for fear of living too many extreme tone whips. The only characteristic linking them all together, in fact, is their ambition in their respective sand trays.

There is pulsating pain at the heart of the first assured feature film by the writer / director Sophy Romvari “Blue heron“It strikes with such precision, it could break you from the inside. You see, there is a fine line between anger and regret, which can lead to a slide between the two posts through an ingenious memory game structure and surprisingly raw vulnerability. It is also a film that exerts so skillfully the best qualities of cinema to shake up tight emotions, we can barely escape without exposing their own past personal pain.

Romvari begins his film with a confession. “It is true that I spent most of my life being angry with him,” explains the narrator (Amy Zimmer) while she points her photo of a cliff to a car rolled through a wooden road. “The more I get older, the more I feel that I never even knew him.” Soon, we learn that this vehicle is occupied by a Canadian-Hungarian family, including three sons, a daughter, a mother (Iringó Réti) and a father (ádám Tompa). The eldest son, Jeremy (Erik Beddoes), is generally in a bad mood and distant. The father and the mother often worry about the strangulation of Jeremy, which stems from a mental illness that no one can completely name. Although Sasha (Eylul Guven) is our protagonist, we do not always look at the world directly through his young perspective. Sometimes we see it from the father’s camcorder or reflected in Windows. The camera will sometimes derive and move away in elaborate pans, maintaining a point of view which often recalls Max Ophüls, especially during the opening scene of “The earrings of Madame de …”

At the beginning, it seems completely clear where the Romvari film is heading, which could make a Glib viewer have in a hurry this intense film from age to age with works that mix memory and pain, such as “Aftersun” or “all of us foreigners”. But just as we feel like we have learned a lot about Jeremy’s rebellion and possible suicidal ideas, Romvari takes out the sous carpet. The second half of “Blue Heron” becomes less narrative stable, pinching and pulling on the past and the present together until they are almost indistinguishable.

The short documentary of Romvari, “Still Processing”, which examines the sorrow caused by the death of the filmmaker’s brothers, serves as a thematic precursor to “Blue Heron”. And yet, this film does not suggest a reshuffle of the land formerly explored, but the capture of new revelations extracted from a greater passage of time. The aesthetic language inspired by the documentary is also used but overturned, objective but evocative. In the end, what is found is not an understanding of what happened, but an acceptance of the person who experienced it.

I will try to describe Radu Jude “Dracula“In the simplest way possible: it’s fucking nuts. For one, if you arrive at his film while waiting for a faithful adaptation of Bram Stoker’s material, well, I don’t know why you expect this from the director who has done luck or Looney Porn.” On the contrary, the film serves as a continuation to the false criticism of the filmmaker of the Romanian filmmaker “do not expect too much from the end of the world”. Like this film, the writer / director disavows the good taste while questioning politics, economics, history and local culture for a treatise on media studies which does not leave unscathed.

Jude, however, might not think that he is in danger. After all, the joke is quite obvious: the film follows a director (Adonis Tanța) whose lack of talent makes him turn to AI to make a version of “Dracula” which will prevail by the Hollywood adulation. Although there is a Plot A, which involves a Romanian late evening show with a helpless actor (Gabriel Spahiu) and its Vampi Vive (Oana Maria Zaharia) which happens horribly bad – there are also B studs through Z too. These are inspired by the invitation that the director asks the AI to return. We make fun and we laugh because the computer does not come close to carrying out standard cinema, tonal consciousness or even specific genres. When the director asks the DR. AI Juddex 0.0 to make a sexy film of lesbian vampires, he admits not to have functions for diversity because it was performed on the European market. At another time, he tries to redo the “nosferatu” of FW Munnau so that the computer reimagine the classic as advertisements for vitamins, tourism and porn. Late, R when he wants to dr. AI Juddex 0.0 to make a silent film, only half of the film is silent.

None of the Draculas is played by the same person, the shots are sometimes out of development, and the extras are so under filled that they often appear as cardboard holders. Sometimes the film is extremely grotesque, especially each time a wave of generating sabers flashes with the rambling of the horseradish on the cherry pie. The point is clear: Jude hates ai. And so he made a whole film to show how bad it is.

Many will probably oppose Jude’s Lampoonish method, as it could suggest to people pro-ai that it is possible to make a three-hour film like Jude with the same technology. But even with “Dracula” having the characteristics of the tonal approach of Jude: a lot of sex (there is a section where a farmer makes a harvest of cocks), a lot of curse and knowingly coarse – his more serious political arguments lack refinement, seeming to be lax and almost unbeatable. And maybe for this film, it’s a feature, not a problem. Jude tried AI, and he made a worse film for that, which could be among the rare examples of a director taking several steps back to make a film that will be studied for decades.

One of Locarno’s most open films could be the western fantastic of Dunham Dunham “Legend of the Happy Worker. “It is a knowingly serious kitsch work whose caricatured approach comes out of the most experimental films presented here. While” Legend of the Happy Worker “does not reach these summits, its playful mood and its stowed aesthetic are not completely foreign to” Twin Peaks “or to the realizations of realizations of Dunham as” Halloweentwn ” promise that there is a line through).

The mythical sinuous work concerns a dug city founded by the OIE family (Thomas Haden Church), a resolved but uniform leader and cowboy which identifies the naive bélissant digger Joe (Josh Whitehouse) as someone who could potentially become a foreman of the many workers in the region. Although these workers spend their days digging a hole for reasons that we cannot understand, they do not seem to be injured. They really like to plow the earth. Their utopian existence is however disturbed by the return of the average key (Colm Meaney), which wants to use tractors to dig more deeply in the ground. It is with good heart and eyes wide Joe, the nephew of Clete, to stop him.

Dunham’s film is in a sort of gray area; It is not as cute as the material suggests or as nightmarish as it could do. For each scene stalling a race or a turtle shovel becoming a kind of excalibur, there is also a murder of composure. Joe’s wife, Joanne (Megan Holder), is seriously underdeveloped, and the aspects of the fable are too obviously returned to be fully transporting. Nevertheless, the church is simply astounding, bringing an improbable gravity mixed with a quiet comic timing for a bewitching quality. Whitehouse, whose performance is deliberately grumpy, strictly follows the arc of his character, becoming a hero of Quippy who deserves to be followed.

Even when “Legend of the Happy Worker” is difficult, I found myself a little indulgent. This kind of too sentimental work told with a light touch was common in the 1990s, especially in children’s sports films like “Angels in the Outfield” or in “little giants” led by Dunham. So, it’s a bit comforting to see a film like this in nature somewhere, even if the film itself is not as wild as material promises.