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TThe Venice Film Festival is normally the most relaxing category A event of the European film scene. Quiet walks at the Palazzo del Cinema, pasta lunches under the trees, lots of movies that you do not really need to take in a hurry … But not this year. Three months after a discreet Cannes, the 75th Mostra took over with a sparkling selection of titles that you could not miss – the caliber of the Coens, Mike Leigh, Alfonso Cuarón, Paul Greengrass and even, beyond the grave , Orson Welles. In addition, there were several movies well beyond two hours, elbows or even three hours. It's a lot less time to suck Camparis.
You still have to prepare for disappointments when festivals offer a high concentration of celebrity names, but Venice has produced remarkably fewer misses and a host of attractive and daring films that will allow the Guillermo del Toro jury in Cannes and Berlin to rise to the occasion. their rivalry.
Venice had the advantage of enjoying the cries of this year between Cannes and Netflix, so that some titles expected on the Croisette found themselves on the Lido. Among the six Netflix films featured here were Cuarón Roma, Greengrass's 22nd of July and the Coen brothers Buster Scruggs Ballad. The latter, one of the two westerns competing, was a happy but gloomy flagship, but the perfectionist path of the Coens with pastiche can be a little airless to be really enjoyable. More organic was Jacques Audiard Siblingswho played Patrick DeWitt's astonishingly straight novel, starring John C Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix as itinerant assassins: a nice, not quite deep but telling story of the French filmmaker's true love for the western genre.
Other highlights of the competition included The favourite, by Lobster director Yorgos Lanthimos, a fragile story in the early eighteenth century about political and sexual intrigue at the court of Queen Anne. Indeed, a restoration All about Eve, it could have appeared as a brilliantly scripted English costume, but the eccentricity of his spirit is revealed by the stylized direction of Lanthimos. Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone are very talented. As a story of female rivalry, it was strangely paralleled by Luca Guadagnino's horror remake Suspiria, with Dakota Johnson involved in witchcraft in a dance school run by Tilda Swinton: pure delirium, but sometimes exasperatedly stupid.
Above all in terms of formal boldness Sunset, Hungarian prodigy László Nemes – his follow-up to the controversial drama of the Holocaust Son of Saul. Located in Budapest in the 1910s, it was the story of a young woman trying to solve a family mystery while mingling with the imperial intrigues of the cape and dagger behind the scenes of a high-end miller. Juli Jakab, in a role defined by a sharp and unadorned, plays the role of leader, while thousands of people rush, often blurred, in the background. It was the festival's first scratcher and a grandiose feat of flamboyant experience.
No less daring was Vox Lux, starring Natalie Portman as a very media pop star and very Gaga. Brady Corbet's film is a daring and cerebral reflection on zeitgeist and parallels between terrorism and the entertainment industry. It's as elegant as it is controversial, and Portman's neurotic and thorny performances were fascinating – far beyond Lady Gaga herself, which was laudable but unconvincing in Bradley Cooper's tepid atmosphere. A star is born remake.
Although there was much praise, I could not be very warm with Mike Leigh. PeterlooThe history of the massacre of political protesters in Manchester in 1819. With speeches (probably scrupulously authenticated), the film often draws on broad strokes, especially when it s'. is the corrupt indulgences of the English powers. It's a story that needs to be told, but the weight of the subject seems to have weakened Leigh's sharpness of character.
Paul Greengrass also touched on a difficult subject. 22nd of July, the second film of this year to reconstruct the killings perpetrated in Norway by the far-right fanatical Anders Breivik. While the other, Erik Poppe U – July 22Focused on a real-time reenactment of events on Utøya Island, Greengrass's film takes us directly to Breivik's trial and presents a fascinating performance by Anders Danielsen Lie as Breivik, a scary portrait of inhumanity mislaid.
One of the stars of this year was the fact that there was only one director in the competition – Australian screenwriter and director Jennifer Kent, who created the extremely original cooler. The babadook. His follow-up, The Nightingale, is an adventure story of the time, fueled by feminist rage and anti-colonial protest. Located in Tasmania in the nineteenth century, it is a young Irish (Aisling Franciosi) who wants to avenge an atrocity committed by English soldiers. She is helped by a young Aboriginal tracker, played brilliantly and wittily by newcomer Baykali Ganambarr, and their quest leads them through a dense forest and a maelstrom of bleeding. The film is too long and suffers from repetition and hyperbole, but somewhere it's a politically charged B-movie with a real fire.
An unexpected treatment of the kind was Dragged Across Concrete – a tense and complex thriller by S Craig Zahler, with a real touch of Michael Mann. He portrays Mel Gibson and Vince Vaughn as cops burying themselves in a bank robbery: loaded with baroque jokes, the film plays intelligently so cynically with Gibson's reputation, and the execution is straightforward. The violence is breathtaking, though. Entrails in a burglary movie? Surely a first.
It is too early to judge Orson Welles' decision. The other side of the wind – After all, it's only been 48 years since he started shooting. His latest legendary film is finally over, with the support of Netflix, and it's a rum, covering the last night of a director Wellesian's life, played by another Hollywood patriarch, John Huston.
Much of the film is a vertiginous evening sequence, with a young Peter Bogdanovich playing essentially the role of the director's protégé. In this black and white film, color excerpts from a parodic art number where Welles' muse and co-writer, Oja Kodar, advances, mostly naked, through highly expressionistic scenes that suggest Michelangelo Antonioni as responsible for the 1970s. Penthouse shoot. It's sometimes embarrassing, sometimes impenetrable, sometimes dazzling – and most importantly, a testimony from the late Gary Graver, who shot the film piecemeal for many years.
So, finally, did Venice give us masterpieces? Yes, resounding – a good old school. His Roma by Alfonso Cuarón, the virtuoso director of Gravity and Children of men. Abandoning the show and photographing the shiny, metallized black-and-white film himself, Cuarón produced a fascinating film inspired by his childhood in Mexico City. Roma takes place in a mansion where everyday life takes place in a context of political turmoil. The action is seen through the eyes of a young maid, Cleo, played by unprofessional chef Yalitza Aparicio – in real life, a recently qualified teacher – whose candid and beautifully modified performance was one of the outstanding human factors of this festival. It could be jeopardized for a jury led by Guillermo del Toro to award a Mexican film to the Golden Lion, but Roma is a film absolutely in the great neorealist Italian tradition, so Venice would be the perfect place to honor it.
The best of Venice
Best film Roma by Alfonso Cuarón.
The worst movie Capri-Revolution: An Italian goat breeder joins the proto-hippie colony, embraces naturism, interpretive dance and levitation. In 1914!
Best performance (female) Mexican newcomer Yalitza Aparicio to Roma; Natalie Portman in Vox Lux; Emma Stone in The favourite.
Best performance (male) Anders Danielsen Lie as Anders Breivik in 22nd of July; new entrance Baykali Ganambarr in The Nightingale.
Best star-to-be Tory Kittles as ex-American African-American, defeating Mel Gibson and Vince Vaughn Dragged Across Concrete.
Best script The favourite, written by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara.
Best soundtracks Michel Legrand's new jazz score for Orson Welles The other side of the wind; and the bizarre double play of Sia, the pop singer, and Scott Walker, an anti-pop experimental legend. Vox Lux.
Worst cowboy songs The country of Bradley Cooper A star is born.
Best cowboy songs Tim Blake Nelson sings and plays Gunslingin Buster Scruggs Ballad. Yee haa!
Better animal performance A resounding victory for Mexico this year. A tie between the raging bulls of Carlos Reygadas Our time and Borras in Roma, a family dog with a beautiful line of jumps (and disconcerting bowels).
The "Have you met my wife?" Award in 2018 – for older male directors who are inclined to film their partners indelibly. Winners: Carlos Reygadas, filming his wife, Natalia López, as a woman with a voyeur husband (played by himself) in Our time. And Orson Welles, whose The other side of the wind proved that he loved his girlfriend Oja Kodar very much (even though he did not give her any lines).
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