“Bang Bang”, “Death Will Come” and more

Although his works do not enjoy the cult status of the Columbia Pictures classics that formed a major part of the 72nd Locarno Film Festival's retrospective program, Samuel Fuller is a director who has nonetheless had a significant influence on the kind of independent cinema that the event seeks to promote. A screening of Fuller's penultimate feature, Road of no returnwhich was shown this year as part of the Histoires de Cinema section in Locarno, inevitably seems like an outsider in today's film landscape.

After the visually striking opening sequence in which a gang war rages in the streets of a run-down, almost post-apocalyptic city, the 1989 film follows a homeless man (Keith Carradine) as he tracks down his former lover (Valentina Vargas) and seeks revenge on the drug dealer (Marc de Jonge) who slit his throat and ended his career as a successful, globe-trotting singer.

An incendiary time capsule from the '80s that reveals its main antagonist is in cahoots with the mayor and local police to flood impoverished black neighborhoods with crack cocaine. Road of no return is an example of Fuller's direct narrative style and the confrontational, broad-brush sincerity of his politics. And his unaffected embrace of genre is particularly powerful in an era when hollow nostalgia, deliberate revisionism, or prestige pastiche are common.

Premiering at the festival this year and powered by a rare leading role for Tim Blake Nelson, Vincent Grashaw’s Bang Bang demonstrated a more contemporary, ambivalent approach to the genre's boundaries. It centers on washed-up prizefighter Bernard “Bang Bang” Rozyski, a former featherweight champion who has little left to show for the steady, high prize money he enjoyed in his youth. Bitter and alcoholic but with plenty of fighting spirit, he takes Justin (Andrew Liner), the wayward son of his estranged daughter Jen (Nina Arlanda), under his wing and trains him for the local boxing circuit, largely ignoring his grandson's general disinterest or enthusiasm for the sweet science.

Rozyki's fickle decrepitude is reflected in the film's dilapidated, unstable urban setting, a post-industrial Detroit whose decline the man regularly laments without expressing any desire for conditions to improve. Indeed, his disgust at the revelation that Justin is working unpaid to clean up the city as a volunteer is a clear indication of his defeatist, self-destructive attitude. Both his anger at the premature end of his career and his disappointment at the compromised reality in which he lives find an outlet in the figure of Darnell Washington (Glenn Plummer), a former boxing rival who has since become wealthy and is now running as a candidate for mayor of Detroit.

The film consists almost entirely of hackneyed boxing movie cliches, and the biting quips in Will Janowitz's spot-on screenplay do little to connect it to reality. Bang Bang still has a rawness that makes it consistently compelling. Blake Nelson is a charismatic presence at the heart of a uniformly excellent cast, though the down-to-earth underdog charm peeking out from beneath his macho persona makes him seem like an unlikely former boxer. With nuanced performances and an appealingly understated, grimy aesthetic, Grashaw's film hits a sweet spot between generic comeback story and lived-in character study, stopping just short of romanticizing its sordid milieu and avoiding sentimentality more often than one might expect.

A final confrontation between Rozyski and Washington is pressing Bang Bang far beyond the realm of plausibility, but also underscores the inherent absurdity of men being rewarded for successfully channeling their emotions into physical violence. Ultimately, Grashaw attempts to retrospectively excuse his clichédness by implicating the heroic fighter archetype in even the film's most tragic developments. While the dialogue perhaps makes this point a little too explicitly, the film is refreshingly lacking in catharsis or resolution Bang Bang's portrayal of wounded masculinity and wasted human potential.

Another strikingly deglamorized story about violent characters on the fringes of society, Death will come is a less successful take on familiar genre fare. Christoph Hochhäusler's thriller is set mainly in Luxembourg and Germany, but has the glacial pace, washed-out colors and minimalist interiors of a Nordic noir. It paints a bland picture of mid-level organized crime and widespread moral decay in and around anonymous urban enclaves where stylish assassin Tez (Sophie Verbeek) is recruited by seasoned crime boss Charles Mahr (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) to investigate the murder of one of his most trusted couriers.

Hochhausler's fourth film has a satisfying abundance of procedural detail but is a little too restrained for its own good, with flat characters and a general lack of dramatic tension that a showman could have concealed with some skill. With her androgynous looks and a steely meticulousness that barely breaks her calm demeanor, the enigmatic Tez is a fascinatingly offbeat protagonist, though the assassin's motives and background are ultimately too obscure for her to do anything other than advance the plot.

Early on, a cutting-edge new line of sex dolls is introduced as a potential threat to the brothel business that Mahr made his fortune from, suggesting the inexorable advance of a more impersonal, sterile modernity. Had this theme been developed further, the overall sense of inertia and redundancy that the film exudes might have been more poignant. As it is, Death will come shows that tasteful European boredom is a far less effective response to the faded glory of an old way of life than Bang Bang's outraged punch in the gut, not to mention the stylized bloodbath of Road of no returns clear, undisguised power fantasy.

The Locarno Film Festival took place from August 7 to 17.