Best International Film: Switzerland's "Thunder" and Austria's "Vera"

by Cláudio Alves

After a litany of TIFF titles, Sweden's Opponent, and a pair of Latin American gems, let's take our Best International Film odyssey to Central Europe. There, we find a most curious couple from neighboring nations – a Swiss period piece about sexual repression and an Austrian docu-drama hybrid on an Italian celebrity. Both countries succeeded with the Academy in the past, having won twice each. Switzerland had its heyday in the last decades of the 20th century, taking the trophy for 1984's Dangerous Moves and 1990's Journey of Hope. For Austria, the triumph's more recent, with 2007's The Counterfeiters and 2012's Amour.

Thunder and Vera aren't likely victors like those past titles, but they're worth your time, nevertheless…

THUNDER, Switzerland

Why do you torment yourself when it's simple to obey?

Paintings and old photographs welcome you into Thunder, as if the film were an exercise in imagining still lives revived. They are the existences of forgotten peasantry, late 19th and early 20th century folk who worked the land up on the Swiss mountains. Their past becomes the screen's present through the miracle of cinema, and the postcard prettiness of Alpine tableaux is consequently complicated. There's darkness in these pastoral sights, innocence lost long before a girl called Innocente is found dead. This isn't her story, though. Instead, the camera follows her sister, 17-year-old Elisabeth, who returns home after spending the past five years in a convent.

Divested of her habit, the grief-stricken nun looks like any other young woman working the fields. In some ways, she looks like her sister, dressed in the dearly departed's old clothes and taking up her farming duties. Whenever others gaze upon her or when her eyes catch a mirror, a ghost looks back. The diary found hidden between sown-shut sheets does more to resurrect the dead, memories and confessions strewn between pages, tears and pressed flowers. Desire erupts from that written word, tales of want connecting Innocente to the three shepherds Elisabeth spied masturbating. Slowly, an image starts to coalesce, of a woman discovering herself and being punished for it.

Fates reprised, Innocente's doom starts to rhyme with Elisabeth's journey, and the mystery of death becomes the enigma of looking within. Listen deeply, and you'll find that the heart asks for pleasure first. Director Carmen Jaquier proposes a teenaged Black Narcissus where, instead of going mad with lust, a nun finds euphoria when surrendering to it. And violence, when it comes, is not her doing, nor her lovers. Instead, it's a repressive order from without, spouting faith and tradition as justifications for oppression, shackling people to conscripted roles that leave no space for humanity. So much so that, in the open air of the Alps, Thunder can feel claustrophobic.

As it oscillates between landscape and sensual closeup, the camera tackles these tensions of religiosity clashing with the body's needs, visualizing them with painterly splendor. Cinematographer Marine Atlan performs miracles as she lets the majesty of mountains at sunset be as breathtaking as the touch of bare skin, sun-kissed naked flesh, the communion of cum Godlier than the priest's wafer. Sound works similarly, and the wind sings a church choir. In a memorable sequence, these elements even conspire to suggest horror stylings, a nightmare waking into a wet dream. Through it all, Thunder seduces the senses and massacres the soul.

I won't apologize for having become a woman of blood and desire. It's as God made me.

VERA, Austria

Promise me you don't just see yourself as the daughter of…

Tizza Covi and Reiner Frimmel have built their careers upon a foundation of hybridized docu-fiction, recruiting curious personalities to perform themselves on camera and achieve something more real than reality. It's the adage of a lie that tells the truth, portraiture in constant negotiations of candor through falsity. They redefine artifice as a gateway to honesty, using the visual idioms of non-fiction filmmaking to look upon their subjects and, in their odd manner, propose a cinematic ethos not too distant from the Italian Neorealism of old. Speaking of Italy's celluloid past – have you heard of Giuliano Gemma? 

The specter of that Spaghetti Western star looms over Vera, both the film and the man's middle-aged daughter. She's Vera Gemma, our protagonist, who we meet walking the red carpet at some glitzy premiere. For a directing duo whose focus tends to fall on those living at society's margins, the flashiness of the setting seems incongruent, if not downright shocking. But the more we spend with her, the more we understand Vera as the ideal Covi-Frimmel "character." Still reeling from Giuliano's death, she's trapped in stagnation, both emotional and professional, musing on mortality while her name proves to be more of a curse than blessing.

Sure, it opens doors that would have otherwise remained closed, but it doesn't necessarily allow her to cross them. She's stuck looking in, rejected by a director because her face is "too modern," yet asked to take a selfie with the same man once her father's name comes up. Vera's appearance is scrutinized in other arenas, and, at times, the camera itself seems on the precipice of judgment. It never goes there, however, faithful to a humanistic integrity keener on interrogating her idiosyncrasies than making them into fodder for cheap spectacle. And thus, what could have been a superficial exercise reveals itself as deep as a woman's heart.

Generous, full of empathy, the film orbits around Vera Gemma to the point we feel intimately close to her interiority, or, at the very least, her fictionalized facsimile. Though seemingly shapeless, Vera grows through the accumulation of detail - one of those odd experiences where one feels like one knows a screen figure better than oneself. Even as it goes down the road of melodrama, the film remains sharp, dissecting the transactional nature of multiple relationships. It's tragic, sometimes funny, unconventionally moving, warm, and surprising, too, culminating in a ruthless gut punch of an ending with Vera alone in the Roman night.

Never depend on other people's judgment. Never.

Thunder is currently in theaters, enjoying a limited release. Vera remains unreleased, but fingers crossed that this submission helps it reach wider audiences.