Francesco Rizzi (2018)

The woman introducing the Swiss film Cronofobia at the Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) welcomed the director (and co-writer) Francesco Rizzi to the stage, then reminded us to be ready with questions for him in the Q&A session after the screening.  At the end, more people seemed to be leaving than staying to hear more.  The man in the late-middle-aged couple I followed out said to his female companion, ‘I’ve got a question – what the fuck was that about?’  (You need to hear this in a Scottish accent to get the full effect.)  This may read as a typical philistine judgment on a complex, challenging arthouse piece but Cronofobia deserves the putdown.

In some ways, this debut feature feels antique.  It’s as if Rizzi (who did the screenplay with Daniela Gambaro) has just discovered Antonioni and the Resnais of Last Year at Marienbad.  The style might be described as obvious crypticism.  Each carefully composed image (the DP is Simon Guy Fässler) proclaims its ingenuity and withholds its deeper meaning.  Even so, and pace the disgruntled punter quoted above, familiar themes do come through.  Halting dialogue, for example, signals how hard it is for two people really-to-communicate.  Rizzi is chiefly interested in the uncertainty of personal identity.  The lead male character Michael Suter (Vinicio Marchioni) puts on false moustaches and beards.  He shares his forename with an elder brother who died in infancy.  As the relationship between them develops, Michael’s female counterpart Anna Martini (Sabine Timoteo) engages him in conversations that she also recorded with her recently deceased husband Manuel (Alberto Ruano, glimpsed in the video recordings).  Michael eventually takes his leave of Anna by imitating Manuel’s appearance and putting other clothes from the latter’s wardrobe in a suitcase, before driving away.  By demonstrating to Anna that her husband has left her, Michael is, I suppose, enabling her to ‘move on’.

The most striking element of Cronofobia concerns Michael’s job, which is the main thing he wears disguises for and which involves leading people in a variety of occupations to reveal that they are, or are prepared to be, on the fiddle.   These start with an assistant in a jeweller’s shop (Adele Raes) and end with a worker in a motorway services eatery (Jasmin Mattei).  As well as the others in between, it emerges that a previous assignment centred on Manuel Martini, a financier who committed suicide thanks to Michael’s exposure of his malpractice.  Until he becomes increasingly uncomfortable with his work, Michael is having an affair with his line manager (Giorgia Salari).  The sinister agency that employs them, and which appears to operate across Switzerland, gives a Big Brother-ish charge to what looks to be Rizzi’s other main purpose:  to show the individual’s alienation from a society at best depersonalising and at worst threatening.

You watch Cronofobia with a feeling of surprise that this kind of stuff is still considered worth dramatising on a cinema screen.  Perhaps Rizzi feels it’s time to update what Pauline Kael disparaged in a 1963 article as ‘Come-Dressed-as-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe parties’.  Whatever his intentions, the director relies on strong details from other famous movies to help him on his way.  In her first scene, Anna takes a shower, then (puzzlingly) puts on jogging gear and makes her way to a railway line near her home.  She waits for a train to roar by and yells, rather as Sally Bowles did in Cabaret, except that the noise Anna makes is decidedly tortured.  When she first suggests a relationship to Michael, she stipulates no names, no pasts – like the rules of engagement declared in Last Tango in Paris.  Other echoes have a more generic feel, such as a scene in which Michael visits his aging, seemingly demented mother (Carla Cassola) in a nursing home – the mother’s only appearance.  There are plenty of shots from within Michael’s camper van that show ominous empty roads ahead.

Both main female parts seemed to me overplayed, though Sabine Timoteo is much more technically accomplished than Giorgia Salari.  Vinicio Marchioni is considerably better.  Immediately before seeing Cronofobia, I went to a highly entertaining and informative EIFF interview, conducted by the journalist Siobhan Synnot, with the fine young actor Jack Lowden (a member of this year’s festival jury).  Lowden was funny talking about his first film job after working exclusively in theatre in his early years.  He followed an experienced screen performer’s advice to ‘do nothing and you’ll do everything’.  When Lowden saw the rushes, he realised, to his dismay, ‘I really was doing nothing’.  In his best moments here, Vinicio Marchioni gives seeming to do nothing a relatively good name.  If Rizzi means to create a sense of mystery, Marchioni is his chief asset in that department.

The film is mostly in Italian, though at one point a rough, expressive voice reads Charles Bukowski’s poem ‘Nirvana’ in its entirety and in English.  (Is it Tom Waits’s voice?  The YouTube clip of Waits reading ‘Nirvana’ certainly sounds very similar.)   Francesco Rizzi’s title means ‘fear of the passage of time’.  To end on a cheap shot, fear that time has come to a standstill is likely to be a bigger concern to viewers of Cronofobia.

21 June 2019