To most British movie-watchers, Turin means only one thing: The Italian Job. But while Peter Collinson's 1969 perennial did of course make spectacular and inventive use of the city's unique geography and architecture, this was just one episode in the very long association between cinema and the metropolis on the river Po: just as Italy as we know it came into being in Turin (first capital of the unified state back in 1871), Italian cinema flickered into life in the city at the cusp of the 19th and 20th centuries.

But it's cinema of the present and the future which is the focus every November when the Torino Film Festival unspools in three separate cinemas over ten packed days. The jamboree was originally known as the Festival di Cinema Giovane - literally "young cinema" - and the emphasis remains on the new, the radical and the daring. Turin has thus become firmly established one of the three big 'alternative' European film-festivals alongside Vienna and Rotterdam, in renegade counterpoint to the stuffier, grander trio of Cannes, Berlin and Venice.

It's somewhat ironic, then, that a festival so famous for forging ahead should also have become so renowned for casting backward glances - in the form of extensive, notably well-researched retrospectives, often for major, underappreciated American auteurs. The festival organisers make no bones about their love of 'Americana': every year they programme an entire sidebar with that very name, and this year included films from decidedly non-youthful figures like Clint Eastwood (opening-nighter Flags of Our Fathers), William Friedkin (hitting yet another career speedbump with the histrionic Bug), and Christopher Guest (responsible for "surprise" film For Your Consideration, an utterly witless 'comedy' which will come as a major disappointment to fans of his Best In Show and A Mighty Wind).

Having in previous years showcased the likes of Walter Hill, John Landis, John Milius and John Carpenter, this year the main retrospective focus was on Robert Aldrich (1918-1983), the profilic director/producer best known for The Dirty Dozen, What Ever Happened To Baby Jane, and Kiss Me Deadly, but revealed here as a bold, commercially-minded director of consistently impressive range. I saw 29 features at Torino 2006 and the one that impressed me most was definitely Aldrich's little-seen Twilight's Last Gleaming whose commercial failure all but wrecked his career when it came out in 1977.

It's a taut, blackly comic, wildly ambitious political thriller in which a disaffected former general (Burt Lancaster) gains control of America's nuclear arsenal, with the goal of forcing the President (Charles Durning, in a truly barnstorming turn) to admit the truth behind the country's disastrous involvement in Vietnam. Though dismissed as wildly improbable on its initial release, the picture now has an eerily prescient and chilling topicality - while also working brilliantly as a high-stakes, no-nonsense page-turner - that would make it an eminently suitable candidate for trans-Atlantic re-release.

The festival's other main retrospectives were for French thriller maestro Claude Chabrol (the second section of a dizzyingly complete two-part tribute which began last year), and for the recently-deceased Catalan writer-director Joaquin Jorda. It was fitting, then, that the festival's best new film should be by one of Jorda's many proteges, 36-year-old barcelonisto Marc Recha. His August Days is a lyrically disturbing record of a trip taken by Recha and his brother David into the Catalan hinterland during the baking summer of 2004. Fiction and documentary blur in alluring fashion as the pair explore a natural world under threat from man's encroachments: the film is as troubling to ponder as it is seductive to look at, and would be eminently deserving of a British arthouse release. Whatever the fate of this particular film, Recha is a name you'll be hearing a lot more about in the coming years.

It wasn't just the Jorda and Recha films which provided a distinct Catalan flavour to Torino's menu this year: the main competition was won by yet another Barcelona resident, namely the multi-talented writer-director-producer Albert Serra with his debut feature Honour of the Knights (aka Honor de cavalleria.) A radically innovative adaptation of Cervantes' classic novel Don Quixote, the austerely stripped-down film has found much favour with critics and juries since debuting at Cannes back in May. For me the ostentatiously slow film is, like its protagonist, something of a noble failure - capturing all too well the torpor and ennui of a life reluctantly but gracefully winding down to oblivion.

Among the entries in the rather lukewarm-to-tepid competition, I preferred four other candidates: Todd Rohal's discombobulatingly weird American "indie" The Guatemalan Handshake (what a David Lynch small-town sitcom might be like); Zina Modiano's slight but utterly beguiling Henry James adaptation The Private Life (featuring a double role for the man who's arguably current world cinema's most engagingly charismatic thespian, Aurelien Recoing); Zhanabek Zhetiruov's rural Kazakh chronicle The Lineman's Diary (nothing if not topical, in this year of Borat) and, perhaps edging ahead of the pack by the shortest of short heads, XIA Peng's thunderously divisive and controversial Pleasures of Ordinary.

Here, surely, is a film which properly sums up the proper spirit of Cinema Giovane - if, indeed, it can be properly labelled as a film at all. Reportedly smuggled out of the country at considerable personal risk to the director (a self-effacing 23-year-old), it's an extremely rough-arsed, no-budget, two-hour documentary about everyday city life in back-of-beyond Shaanxi province that attracted a radically wide range of reactions from those who've seen it.

All three Turin screenings of the awkwardly-titled Pleasures of Ordinary* featured many walkouts, which is a shame as the picture only really makes sense if you stick with it right to the end (the final few minutes are by far the most powerful thing about the whole movie). It was described by one juror as "the worst film I've ever seen," by another as "vital as a historical document, non-existent in terms of cinema" and by a savvy American critic as "great." I'm somewhere in the middle: it's a difficult, sprawling mess of a picture, but it gets better the more you think about it (which is much more than can be said for most films these days.) I'll go out on a limb and say that I reckon Xia - who, even his harshest critics grudgingly agree, achieves some undeniably striking effects with his use of rapid-fire montage - is a talent, albeit one who's presently very much a diamond in the rough.

Neil Young
20th November, 2006
written for an upcoming edition of Tribune magazine


full Jigsaw Lounge Torino '06 section starts HERE





* I didn't check this with Xia personally, but it seems safe to assume that the English translation isn't a reference to the joys of India Pale Ale...