Europe’s largest casino, the Casino di Campione, a gargantuan stone modernist structure resembling a great tuning fork reaching up toward space, is the focus of Austrian director Daniel Hoesl’s Un gran casino, a mesmerising doc hybrid meditation on money and power that had its world premiere in the Harbour section at the Rotterdam International Film Festival.
The chequered past of the gambling complex, which overlooks Lake Lugano in an Italian enclave of the Swiss canton of Ticino, is a subject that fits Hoesl’s sensibility like a glove. He has been satirising the absurd excesses and unaccountability of the mega-rich ever since he won a Tiger award at Rotterdam for this micro-budget first feature Soldate Jeannette (2013), in films including the caustic-humoured fiction features WINWIN (2016) and Veni Vidi Vici (2024), and a documentary on the Swiss alpine town that hosts the World Economic Forum, Davos (2020), the latter two co-directed with Julia Niemann.
Un gran casino is an unusual, slender-length mixture of doomy poetic fable and scathing critique of the deceptions of neoliberal greed. The oblique, mythical bent of its monologue voiceover digressions and its artsy performance elements may frustrate those looking for a conventionally straightforward treatment of the casino’s history, but audiences more experimentally inclined and open to leftfield musings about the invisible hand of capital will find much to mesmerise and surprise.
Echoing Dante’s Divine Comedy envisioning the afterlife, Un gran casino is divided loosely into chapters entitled Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, as it traces the rising and dipping fortunes of the Casino di Campione. The gambling house was founded in 1917 as a front for the gathering of intelligence from foreign diplomats during World War One, and expanded into a new nine-storey monolith as takings flowed in to support the municipality’s status as the richest in Italy. But it plunged into bankruptcy in 2018, as the rise of online gaming hit its revenues and emptied out its vast and luxurious rooms.
The casino’s fate is personified in the guise of archetypal figures (a gambler, and a guardian or messenger from the goddess of money) who reflect on the mystical allure of games of chance and the almost ghostly and cryptic nature of money, which is an entity created out of nothing and seen less the more that it is possessed. The mysterious aspects of finance make it a natural stand-in for religious belief in a Europe that operates on the back of citizens in debt, they suggest, after its decline left humans longing for meaning. Casino croupiers — and later, machines using pure code — uphold the pretense that no system exists, when all the while players are robbed by a facility designed to statistically win in the end. Eighteenth-century Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith’s concept of the self-interested being led by an “invisible hand” that, almost like divine intervention, works for the greater good, is a running thread in this vision of a system that dupes its adherents that there need be no conflict of interest between lavish consumption and the public’s welfare.
Hoesl and D. O. P. Sven Zellner have a sharp eye for the elegant and at times austere and otherworldly visual trappings of an era that has encoded the worship of material power into the environment, but they never let us take glamour at face value. Un gran casino is shot in crisp black-and-white. Its restless camera glides, hungry and acquisitive, over the rows of poker machines and other interfaces of the money mecca, and gazes down from a godlike perspective on a spinning dark mahogany roulette wheel. Religious frescoes in a chapel are also perused, building up a parallel between these sites of idolatry. The archetypes who drift through this gilded lakeside world as ciphers of a neo-liberal order are impeccably dressed in outfits that signal cash-flush refinement, but the noir tinge of risky secrets and conspiracy that colours this arcane and atmospheric film lets us know that glossy veneers are no synonym for security.
Director: Daniel Hoesl
Screenwriters: Daniel Hoesl, Thomas Koeck
Cinematographer: Sven Zellner
Editing, Sound Design: Gerhard Daurer
Cast: Sandra Ceccarelli, Christina Andrea Rosamilia, Andreas Spechtl
Producers: Georg Aschauer, Daniel Hoesl, Julia Niemann
Music: Ja, Panik
Production Design: Julia Niemann
Production company: European Film Conspiracy (Austria)
Sales: European Film Conspiracy
Venue: Rotterdam (Harbour section)
In Italian, German, English
78 minutes
