I rarely remember movies solely for their substance; most of the time, the space they take up in my mind is built on the feelings I experienced, the place where I saw them, the company — if any. This kind of “metacontext” can also be made of more trivial elements such as the weather, a detail or the way my day unfolded before finally being able to sit in a plush velvet chair in a dark theatre with a sigh of relief. I got soaked once making my way through a reed grove trying to get the best picture of the Capitole, Switzerland’s largest single-screen theatre and survivor of the movie palace era, before it got closed down for renovation. The movie I saw that night is linked with a physical dimension, something I could feel on my skin. In Locarno a few years ago, after seeing a movie that ended with a nuclear explosion, the elderly lady seated next to me started recalling her first experience of the Festival: as a teenager in a catholic boarding school, the nuns had brought the girls to see Visconti’s Il Gattopardo because, she suspected, “several of them had a crush on Delon”. But such details rarely outweigh the movie itself; rather, they help anchor it into the physicality of human existence.
At the press conference that took place last year in Bern to announce the programme of the 72nd Film Festival, Sidney Lumet’s courtroom drama 12 Angry Men was mentioned by Lili Hinstin among other titles as one of her inspirations as a cinephile. The second time I read a mention of the same movie, in an interview also with the Festival’s Director, was in the Centovalli train, the ever so picturesque railway that connects Domodossola with Locarno and provides a welcome break, a decompression chamber between the contingencies of the world and the wonders of Locarno. As a participant of the Critics Academy, I found myself writing about La Fille au bracelet, a French movie screened on the Piazza Grande and whose plot also unfolds mostly in a courtroom. Attending the ensuing conference with the main actress and the crew, I was struck by the resemblance the young woman bore to her character: the way she would lean forward, press the button on her microphone and then, carefully, with chosen words, proceed to talk, was all exactly like in the film. It was a fascinating insight into the way a movie can influence someone’s behaviour.
One of the greatest pleasures that comes with watching a new movie — and this has nothing to do with its release date — is to discover the way it connects with other works already known, influences their reading, the place to which it will be assigned in one’s very own, unique film galaxy. 12 Angry Men and La Fille au bracelet feature a common topic: the legal system, with its intricacies and country-specific particularities, which can provide a powerful insight into a society’s given state. Pierre-François Sauter’s Face au juge is another movie that explores this universe: reflecting on it, one could be reminded of Raymond Depardon’s documentaries about the justice system or, closer in time and place, Prud’hommes, another documentary filmed in a Swiss employment tribunal and part of the Concorso Cineasti del presente in Locarno in 2010. First released in theatres in Switzerland in 2009 and then on Swiss TV in 2010 (and incidentally reduced from 73’ to 53’), Face au juge was Sauter’s first movie. Calabria, his second one, was screened in Locarno in 2016 in the Panorama Suisse section and Far West, set to be released in 2022, has been selected as part of The Films After Tomorrow initiative this year.
“La Suisse n’existe pas” (“Switzerland doesn’t exist”), a phrase coined by artist Ben Vautier for the Universal Exposition of Seville in 1992 and which was then much debated about can be interpreted as a reflection of the country’s cultural, political and linguistic diversity; but it can also be seen as a reference to the seemingly uneventful, lacklustre course of life in a place where everything “runs like clockwork”. So, if Switzerland doesn’t exist, is there such a thing as Swiss cinema? I have to admit: this is a question that has bothered me for years. I know most of the movies commonly admitted in the pantheon of Helvetic films, saw a number of local indie ones; but still, there remained a nagging question I could not answer: that of the identity of Swiss cinema. In a highly unexpected turn of events, the semi-lockdown imposed in Switzerland for several weeks helped shed new light on this issue. Suddenly, lots of movies were not only available online, but also free! Among the few gems I discovered, but also the movies that didn’t leave such a lasting impression on me, a common thread appeared: that of a sense of observation which, transcending a somewhat mundane exterior, takes root in the smallest detail.
But invisible is by no way synonymous with non-existent: as the saying goes, “the devil hides in the details”, an expression whose origin is attributed in turns to an early German proverb, architect Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe or the Swiss themselves, much to their liking. And, one might add, drama hides in the details too, as demonstrated by the string of protagonists who appear one after the other in the judge’s office in Face au juge: a divorced mother who doesn’t pay her rent, a bankrupt mover who lives in his warehouse, a repeatedly drunk driver or two enemy brothers. These are people we see every day, likely without paying much attention to them. The feat lies in the way all those destinies are laid bare, in the exposure of an unfiltered social reality, the world and its sometimes violent, sad and absurd diversity. Rather than a documentary that illustrates a fraction of the Swiss legal system, Sauter’s movie is an immersion in the throes of human nature.