Films by Matteo Garrone and Marina De Van

 

Crossing Europe, a new international film festival in the city of Linz, has invited the Austrian Film Museum to present two recent and exceptional films which have not yet been shown in Austria. On May 12, right after the festival, the two works will also be shown at the Film Museum. Both films belong to a relatively new tradition of European cinema which traces the influential example of Canadian „art horror“ auteur David Cronenberg.

 

Italian filmmaker Matteo Garrone, to whom the festival in Linz is dedicating a tribute, emerged in the mid-1990's with a revised and lively form of "Neoverismo". His most powerful film to date, Il balsamatore (2002), joins an unpretentious approach to reality with an unsettling story about jealousy, loneliness and unfulfilled desire in a psychological thriller beyond the usual clichés. Dans ma peau (2003) is the radical and disturbing début of the French actress Marina De Van as director. De Van is best known for her work together with François Ozon. Her film, in which she also plays the lead, continues the thematic thread of Il balsamatore, but takes it into a more extreme direction. The heroine, who is single-minded and successful when it comes to her work as a marketing executive, injures her leg in the course of a late-night party. The wound becomes an obsession, and her whole body gradually becomes a counter-melody in the well-tempered concert of bourgeois sounds and energies.