Piazza Grande ... the audience during the screening of Berlin Calling. Photo: Fotofestival/Ti-Press/F. Agosta
Locarno is the proverbial sleepy hamlet, with a population of some 15,000 tucked into a valley along the shores of Lake Maggiore, at the foot of the Swiss Alps. But every night for 11 days in August, a good half that number throng the town's central Piazza Grande and gape at the sights imported onto a massive outdoor movie canvas. Down the road the Fevi expo hall hosts another couple of thousand punters, and there are simultaneous screenings at five other sites.
Locarno's international film festival doesn't fetch the stars or elite auteurs of A-list festivals like Cannes, Venice and Berlin, but it's nothing if not eclectic. The night I stumbled in, the piazza was all sturm und drang with Philipp Stölzl's Nordwand (North Face), an Alpine-conquest saga based on an actual Nazi-era tragedy.
Festival first-nighters would have encountered the perhaps more exotic spectacle of Evelyn Waugh's Oxford aristos in the new big-screen condensation of Brideshead Revisited; and I left shortly before the second coming of James Caviezel (Mel Gibson's Christ) as an extra-terrestrial Viking saviour doing battle with a fellow-travelling space monster in Howard McCain's Outlander.
Garth Jennings' pint-sized Stallones got the screen of their dreams as Son of Rambow continued its meandering global rollout, and the piazza also hosted several repertory tributes. Egypt's late Youssef Chahine was saluted with a screening of his exuberant call-to-tolerance Destiny; blacklistee Jules Dassin's London noir Night and the City turned up in a tribute to the Royal Belgian Film Archives; and Italy's Nanni Moretti, the subject of a sweeping festival retrospective, was given the outdoor treatment as a water polo-playing Communist politician with amnesia in his 1989 Palombella Rossa.
I caught Choke, another adaptation of a novel by Chuck Palahniuk, the author of Fight Club. It was suitably off the wall: Sam Rockwell brought his mild derangement to bear as Victor Mancini, a self-loathing sex addict raised by a fugitive hippie mother (Anjelica Huston) who's now la-la in a mental home. To pay her bills, he works in a colonial-history theme park by day, and by night redeems the rich by choking on his food in front of them in restaurants. "Somebody saves your life, they'll love you forever," he counsels.
Victor reckons he'll find redemption in the identification of his unknown father, especially when his mum (mistaking Victor for her lawyer) confesses that his father was not, after all, a travelling salesman from Norway with Tourette's. Instead a new doctor at the hospital (Kelly MacDonald), translating mum's Roman diaries, reveals that Victor owes his paternity and blessed abilities to a fragment of sacred foreskin.
Confused yet? The film (directed by actor Clark Gregg) didn't have the skills or derring-do of David Fincher's Fight Club, but it was amiably shambolic, oddly soft-centred - and certainly kinder to its satyric protagonist than Anne Fontaine's supposedly comic La Fille de Monaco was to its titular nympho.
Julian Temple's The Eternity Man, an adaptation of Jonathan Mills' opera about Arthur Stace, the prolific religious graffitist of Sydney, was also a lot more fun early on, while it dealt in sin rather than salvation.
But I must confess to a hollow feeling for having missed the advent of Nanni Moretti to the festival with a specially devised film quiz. First prize was 11 days in a luxury hotel in Vienna, with a guided visit to the best cake shops in the capital.
