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AMERICAN CINEMA PAPERS PRINT ARCHIVE VENICE
2011 – TEXTUAL PASSIONS |
VENICE 2011 – THE 68TH MOSTRA DEL
CINEMA A BRIGHT SHINING
LION by
Harlan Kennedy No
Venice film festival ever started with such glamour, glitter and celebrity.
We had hardly dragged our boats ashore, on the welcoming Lido, before we were
set upon by Polanski’s all-star CARNAGE, ambushed by Soderbergh’s
all-star CONTAGION, pummelled by George Clooney’s all-star THE IDES OF MARCH.
Barely recovered from these, we were put in a warming cauldron by Madonna –
her W.E. was a screen novelette about the greatest royal romance of all,
between an abdicating English king and a divorced American socialite – and
then our heads and brains were shrunk by TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY. It was a
pleasurable shrinkage. We couldn’t follow the plot but our still-seeing eyes
could goggle admiringly at the Britpack cast. Oldman, Firth and Hurt: all in prime form. And
the whole thing might never have happened at all. You could have believed, on
reaching the island’s centre and viewing its transformed topography, that
there wouldn’t be any festival this year. There it was,
a hole in the ground. A hole as big as the Colosseum,
though in Venice they feed lions to Christians, not the other way round. Yes,
every September, leoni d’oro are shooed into the
Lido di Venezia to be fought over by filmmakers.
And this year you couldn’t help imagining it as a spectacle fit for an
ancient arena since the arena, in a fashion, was there. A massive space and
depth, groined from the earth. A deep-delved void girdling the current Mostra buildings. What was it? It was the aborted dig for
the sadly, momentously abandoned film festival palace. We
were supposed to have it this year. Millions had been spent, then more
millions on tackling a cruelly unforeseen cache of toxic asbestos. Who knew
that the Lido long ago – Adriatic dreamspot – had
deep-buried its old hotel and palace guttering, its beach-hut roofs, god
knows what else. The Italians, seeing the murderous motherlode, threw up
their hands. They said: “Fine. No more new palazzo. We’ll focus on improving
the old one. We’ll honour the festival’s heritage instead of raising
spendthrift new Babylons. (Why didn’t we think of
this first?)”. And
lo! That’s what they are doing. They have expanded and redecorated the
historic Palazzo del Cinema. By next year they’ll have done the same to other
fest venues. Amid
the trumpets of a newly revised future came the cavalry of the famous. If
this is the cast you get for a failed architectural dream, bring it on.
George Clooney, Kate Winslet (in three films),
Jodie Foster, Gwyneth Paltrow, Matt Damon, Al
Pacino……These people weren’t in the mere lightweight sector of the festival:
Hollywood’s usual raft of midnight matinee treats. Some of them were in the
early competition’s two best and big-punching films: Roman Polanski’s
CARNAGE, a New York-set four-hander starring Foster, Winslet,
John C Reilly and Christoph Waltz, and Clooney’s
THE IDES OF MARCH, a tinglingly intelligent
political thriller. IDES
opened the festival, red-carpeting a troupe that also included Ryan Gosling,
Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti. America
does these “selling of a politician” dramas better than any nation on earth:
films blending satire, suspense, sociocultural analysis. Think of THE
CANDIDATE, BOB ROBERTS, PRIMARY COLOURS. Here
Clooney is the Democratic state governor taking a shot at the presidency, on
a no-compromise liberal ticket for which his two PR men, Hoffman and Gosling,
hope to bring in the votes. But there’s many a slip. For starters – or
perhaps in Governor Clooney’s case finishers – there’s the little matter of a
sexy intern (Evan Rachel Wood). There’s
a bitingly witty face-off between rival spin wizards: Gosling and the
Republicans’ Paul Giamatti. There’s Hoffman
delivering a speech of mordant, magisterial wisdom. (The script is co-written
by Beau Willimon from his stage play FARRAGUT
NORTH). Clooney himself is dead centre, and dead right, as the political
charisma marionette having his strings pulled by his own propaganda
puppeteers. Intelligent
mirth – there’s a rarity in mainstream cinema. It’s available in THE IDES OF
MARCH. And it’s copious in Polanski’s CARNAGE, whose
cast will surely give this film (directed from another stage play, French
dramatist Yasmina Reza’s THE GOD OF CARNAGE) a pass
to world multiplexes. Two sets of Brooklyn parents go at each other hammer,
tongs and fire-irons. Their sons got in a nasty fight in a park; Foster and
Reilly’s son was injured, possibly disfigured; should Winslet
and Waltz settle out of court – that is, hand over “hush” cash to the
aggrieved couple in the latters’ sitting room where virtually the entire
action is set? The
characters are scripted with a pen dipped in cyanide. Foster is a politically
correct neurotic who has authored a book on Darfur. Reilly is a male
chauvinist boar with ideas, social-political and sexual-political, from the
Pleistocene age. Waltz is a lawyer forever waltzing into a corner of the room
to take business calls, most of them demonstrating his shyster duplicity and
ruthlessness. Winslet scowls and clucks every time
hubby’s mobile rings, her moral nausea finally finding literal expression when
she pukes up, violently, the pear-and-apple cobbler served in a moment of
errant appeasement by Foster. This
calamity is the heart of the movie. It is monstrously funny, breathtakingly
shocking. Polanski spares no detail of vomit-drenched coffee table books. The
deed is delivered by Winslet as the screen acting
super-stunt of the decade. She can forget TITANIC: now she’s acting with
grownups. Once the upchucking is over the film, if possible, gets better
still, with even the partners in each couple coming apart at the fissure
points and quarrelling violently. Think of WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF,
redone as a Euro-American boulevard tragic farce. Winslet was back the
next day on Venice screens in CONTAGION, striding across latitudes as an
American epidemiologist. Steven Soderbergh’s global
pandemic drama, shown out of competition, is a kind of microbiologist’s
TRAFFIC. It hops world locations with a ritzy cast (Paltrow,
Damon, Jude Law) and escalating plot. It varies
visual styles with a freedom that can only be exercised by a director when
he’s also, under Soderbergh’s nom de camera Peter
Andrews, the cinematographer. With Winslet also showcasing her TV marathon MILDRED PIERCE,
this was another Mostra del Cinema in which we kept
seeing the same faces, varied (or not) in different performances. British
actor Michael Fassbender doubled up in David Cronenberg’s A DANGEROUS METHOD and Steve McQueen’s
SHAME. Though he was a ‘dead actor walking’ in the first – lifelessly
impersonating Carl Jung, opposite Viggo Mortensen’s
no more vivid Freud, in Cronenberg’s creaky
adaptation of Christopher Hampton’s stage play THE TALKING CURE – but a human
powerhouse in the second. McQueen,
who made HUNGER, is a video artist turned filmmaker. He knows how to present
a static-seeming screen image and flood it with slow power. The style is
almost hydro-electric. Fassbender finds the actor’s
equivalent in his own presentation of character. At first set-jawed and
monolithic (and at moments eerily resembling a young Schwarzenegger), he
later thaws and animates. By the last scenes he is a hero agonistes,
stretched on the rack of his own emotional crisis Fassbender plays an
Irish-American ‘sex addict’: a serial thrill-seeker whose habit of instant gratification
(prostitutes, one night flings, cyber-porn) kills
his capacity for long-term relationships. Impotence comes, right on cue, with
every threat of tenderness. The only girl who draws emotion from him is his
sister (Carey Mulligan, another Brit rough-trading with an American accent).
She’s a drifter and semi-junkie, dark eyes under a peroxide mop, who earns
pin money as a lounge singer. This
is a New York seen by McQueen as the capital of glam decadence and glittery
decay. He isn’t afraid of the accusation “shallow outsider’s vision.” He even
has Mulligan sing “New York, New York,” of all hokey choices, in a gaudy
midnight bar. But just when you think this is a coffee-table movie about
high-style self-harm in the big city, SHAME delivers the harsh emetic
realities. Only connect? No one connects here. The characters, and the
audience, are trapped in a tunnelled world as blind, one-directional and Hadean as the subway scenes remorselessly punctuating the
Manhattan lives. WUTHERING
HEIGHTS, another Brit contender for Lionisation, is a more pedigree’d vision of Heaven and Hell. Emily Bronte wrote
the classic novel. Andrea Arnold (RED ROAD, FISH TANK) films with respect for
this love story’s mad Moors-set passion, though she tramples the “literary”
notes into the Yorkshire mud. Cathy and Heathcliff are laconic lovers moved
about miry scenery – it rains a lot – and Heathcliff is black. An Afro
drifter adopted by landowning peasants, he falls for the daughter of the
house, then goes away, then comes back (older and unwiser),
breathing sullen rage and stocked-up desire when she marries the weedy
Linton. The dialogue soon dies out almost completely. By the end the
landscapes do the talking; they and Robbie Ryan’s brilliantly expressive
camerawork, often handheld to catch the trembling of a love that defies class
and here too race. In
mid-festival you couldn’t shut the United Kingdom up. TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER
SPY dishes out John Le Carre dialogue to aging Britpackers – Gary Oldman (as
MI6 mole-hunter George Smiley), Colin Firth, John Hurt – and steers them
through the logorrheic labyrinths of a story once thought the last word in
BBC teledrama. Back
then Alec Guinness provided the lizardy minimalism
and ambrosial drone. Now Oldman delivers the
mandarin monologues amid mise-en-scene given a
Nordic chill by Swedish helmer Tomas Alfredson (LET THE RIGHT ONE). The characters get lost in
the intrigues of cold war espionage; the audience gets lost – pleasurably –
in a seedy world of post-imperial intrigue and bureaucracy. It’s the 1970s.
The sets are piled with old files, the wallpaper is peeling and jaundiced,
the rooms in the London espionage palaces are opaque with the misting vision
of a country just beginning to lose its role, and way, as the torch-bearer of
western democracy. The
Venice Film Festival, watching this film, may have thought it was looking in
a mirror. How long can this festival bear the torch for western Mediterranean
movie junkets? With a mere tittle of the Cannes budget – the eastern Med’s
cine-spree – it struggles at times to keep its schedule flickering and its
ideals afire. Subtitles kept breaking down. Late-night movies started very
late. And the film sorpresa (film surprise), not
for the first time a Chinese film contrabanded into
Venice without its government’s blessing, PEOPLE MOUNTAIN, PEOPLE SEA, was
interrupted by a fire scare. Several rows of cinegoers
scampered into the night when a burning smell broke out. The film itself, a
truth-based revenge thriller with a few side-snarls about work and living
conditions in provincial China, was less incendiary. Yet
there is always renewal. One night, standing before the Palazzo del Cinema
gazing at the row of movie hoardings fronting the Adriatic, I saw a new
poster of a competition picture being glued and slapped up, by a bill sticker
wielding a brush on a high ladder, over an old poster for the same film. Inch
by inch, the fresh advertising space was being unscrolled
over the fraying former one. Symbolic
or what? Just when you despair of the bygone, here comes the brand new. Even
it’s a version of exactly the same thing. The fact that the film was Aleksandr Sokurov’s FAUST added
to the poignant meaningfulness of the moment. The Russian minimalist has
been, for years, the paragon of all things penitential: gloom, murk,
obscurantism, the burbling of incomprehensible dialogue, the muffled music
sounding like colliding stations on a shortwave radio. Sokurov
made WHISPERING PAGES, MOTHER AND SON, MOLOCH:
titles to instil terror in a film festival veteran. Now comes FAUST and the audience rises, after 134 minutes, to
cheer and clap. Sokurov hasn’t exactly changed. The
images are still weird, obfusc and prone to
moment-by-moment distortion. This is because his patented method is to shoot
into mirrors and reflections. The dialogue and music are a macabre burble of
the barely coherent. (Thank god for subtitles). But from the moment the
camera wings down from a magicked heaven towards
the heart of a magicked mediaeval city, perched on
a coastal promontory, we are gripped by a faery enchantment. This is Germany
in the Middle Ages. This is the mad laboratory of a scientist and his dad –
“Faust and Son” – where frightful experiments, like stretching a spinal
sufferer on a homeopathic rack, jostle with alchemy, chemistry and the
demonic pursuit of knowledge and intellectual power. And
surely this is Mephistopheles, a sort of large-waisted
human ant-eater who strips (in a bath scene) to reveal his grotesque frame
including scaly skin and rear-placed genitalia. Actor Anton Adesinskiy speaks seductive obscenities with a
helter-skelter sweetness, following Faust (Johannes Zeller) like a mixture of
shadow and faithful hound. In midsection the film leaves the city to clamber
around forests worthy of German romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich. Here
we canoodle with the beautiful Margarete, a vision
of innocence played by the pearly-skinned, infant-cheeked Isolda
Dychauk. What scholar, dried out by the bones of
knowledge, pierced by the barbs of ambition, couldn’t fall in love with this
girl-woman? The
blood signature is swiftly on the devil’s pact. Faust wants the world, the
flesh and everything: the devil gives it him. His doom is sealed, yet still
the film sings, soars and seesaws, between its multiplying heavens and
earths, its myriad heavens and hells. In final sequences Faust and
Mephistopheles don suits of armour like some imbecilic Quixote and Panza. (Who thought Sokurov had
a sense of humour?). They clamber over lava-rocky landscapes in search of
some clinching Vision of Truth. The image chosen to confront them and us with
the ineffable luminosity – or dazzling lunacy – of existence is a geyser,
which alternates ballistic blasts of upward-shooting water with longer
periods of bubbling, enigmatic inanition. It could
be an image of Faust himself, or of all of us. We are lost in bemusement for
most of our lives, vainly peering into ourselves, our souls or what we fancy
is the common well of existence. Just occasionally, our minds blast off into
space, replacing study with paroxysms of hope, fantasy, longing or
speculation. For
many of us, FAUST was the Golden Lion winner from the moment it ended. Even
the moment it began. It took us into another universe of imagination.
Faustian penalty to be paid? We were dumped back in hell the next day. What
other terms do you use for the punishment of watching Chantal Akerman’s LA FOLIE ALMAYER (Joseph Conrad stretched on a
rack of French-existential preciosity), Mary Harron’s THE MOTH DIARIES (the AMERICAN PSYCHO director
lost to the TWILIGHT zone of girls’ school romantic horror) or Emmanuele Crialese’s
TERRAFERMA. Only yesterday, battling for the host nation, this Italian
director Venice-preemed the inspired RESPIRO: one
woman’s psycho-spiritual crisis on a ravishing island. Now, on the same
island, we get a dreary lecture about fishing crisis and illegal (African)
immigration. Moral:
you don’t go to Venice, most years, for the Italian movies. Unless it’s Marco
Bellocchio reissuing IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER in a
bileful, brilliant new director’s cut – 20 minutes
shorter than the original (there’s a message for other filmmakers
re-scissoring their works) – and receiving a career-achievement Golden Lion
for his pains. He got it, touchingly, from colleague and contemporary Bernardo
Bertolucci, now confined to a wheelchair. The
Golden Lion checked out many movies and animals this year. There was a DARK
HORSE, submitted by Todd Solondz, which cantered
multi-directionally through black comedy, social satire and psycho-tragedy.
This was the tale of two thirtish arrested
developer (Jordan Gelber, Selma Blair) trying to
find life and love in the teeth – not a gift horse’s – of purblind parents
(his, played by Mia Farrow and Christopher Walken)
and manic depression (hers), without the consoling highs of manic. It’s not
HAPPINESS. But unlike other recent films by this director it’s intelligent,
mordant and doesn’t tempt us to sing, “So-londz,
it’s been good to know you…..” Then
the Lion slavered at WILDE SALOME, a sort of exotic fire-emanating reptile,
submitted by one Al Pacino. Pacino is an actor, documentary-maker and ego
wrangler. He trains and wrestles his own self-esteem. We forgive him his
egocentricity since he also has moments of self-doubt, even self-ridicule:
especially in this tribute to Oscar Wilde’s play, once the last word in
wordy, voluptuous decadence. The movie’s in the same mould as LOOKING FOR
RICHARD. Between scenes from a recent LA staging in which Pacino played Herod
– with booming eccentricity – we follow actor-director and crew around Wilde
tourist spots (London, Paris, Italy) learning of the author’s life,
literature and unhappy loves. Someone must have thought,
if only for the fraction of a moment, of calling it LOOKING FOR DICK. The
competition ended with a bang not a whimper. Two bangs. Abel Ferrara’s 4.44:
LAST DAY ON EARTH and William Friedkin’s KILLER JOE
prove that aging American directors never die, they carry on going berserk –
with, perhaps, an ounce more of the elegiac. In Friedkin’s
film all dialogue blazes and all performances crackle (Matthew McConaughey, Gina Gershon, Emile Hirsch). But there are nice black comedy edgings –
sardonic singe marks – in this play-based Texas murder thriller. Ferrara,
20 years after BAD LIEUTENANT, still likes self-destructing heroes. Here it’s
Willem Dafoe, a New Yorker anticipating the end of the world with live-in
painter-girlfriend Shanyn Leigh. Leigh has
discovered Abstract Expressionism at just the right moment, when there will
be no need to clean the floor after use. Various religions – Buddhism,
Catholicism, drugs, sex – fight for ascendancy as the clock ticks towards
Judgment Hour. Skype is used to connect characters around the world. Planet
Earth has become a global village, if only at the point when it is about to
be a global ash-heap. So to
the prizes. The Golden Lion marched straight out and hugged Aleksandr Sokurov. The Russian
director beamingly embraced it back. This was a record: no one had seen Sokurov smile before. Perhaps he could not believe that
this fourth film in a tetralogy about power that has given him an uneven
critical ride – previous movies, MOLOCH (Hitler), TAURUS (Lenin), SUN
(Hirohito) – was such a thumping favourite with everyone. FAUST
was a worthy winner, which is more than one could say for the two runner-up
victors. Crialese’s ponderous TERRAFERMA won
Special Jury Prize. China’s Shangjun Cai won the Best Director Silver Lion for PEOPLE MOUNTAIN
PEOPLE SEA, a movie smuggled into Venice without a Beijing visa, which had
little to commend it beyond its outlaw status. Michael
Fassbender was named Best Actor for SHAME. The
colourfully named Deanie Yip received the Best
Actress trophy, for a touching performance as a maid of all work, and all
epochs, in the admired social-historical span of Ann Hui’s
A SIMPLE LIFE. Venice
was over. But Venice is never over. As history has proved, you can bury it in
the ground, you can wash it out to sea, you can probably fire it into space;
you can even climax it with the horrors of 9/11 as ten years ago. It will always
come back. Some festivals, like some cities (whether on the Hudson or on the
Adriatic), are for keeps. COURTESY T.P. MOVIE NEWS. WITH THANKS TO THE AMERICAN FILM
INSTITUTE FOR THEIR CONTINUING INTEREST IN WORLD CINEMA. ©HARLAN KENNEDY.
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