by Helen Barlow
After going to the 79th Venice Film Festival with guns-ablaze with four films in the competition, Netflix came away empty-handed in the awards. As if being denied Cannes competition births wasn’t enough, the streamer had to watch as the jury made left-of-field choices in Venice. In some cases, the jury – headed by Julianne Moore and including Audrey Diwan, the winner of last year’s Golden Lion for Happening – was spot-on.
Laura Poitras’s documentary The Beauty and the Bloodshed is excellent and deserved the Golden Lion. Martin McDonagh wrote a superb screenplay for The Banshees of Inisherin and deserved his award, best actor winner Colin Farrell is impressive as always in the film, though two awards for the films seemed too much, while Cate Blanchett is excellent in her portrayal of a leading orchestra conductor, even if Todd Field’s TAR is overly long.
Leading up to the awards, many critics deemed Jafar Panahi’s No Bears as a potential winner and the jury probably got it right by awarding the imprisoned Iranian filmmaker a Special Jury prize.
At the jury press conference, the film’s actress Mina Kavani noted how it was “a beautiful gesture” to have an absent place and namecard for Panahi at the table. “He has a passion for cinema and is already thinking of his next movie,” she said.
Luca Guadagnino won the best director award for his intriguing cannibal love story, Bones and All, essentially a look at America’s alienated youth, and while Taylor Russell also won for best newcomer for the film, where she starred alongside Timothee Chalamet, maybe two awards were a bit much there as well.
“Looking at Cate [Blanchett], I feel like she’s going to give me some advice in her eyes,” Russell said at the winners’ press conference, while wondering, “How did I get here among these people?”
Likewise, France’s Alice Diop won two prizes, The Grand Jury prize and the prize for best first film, for Saint Omer, based on the true story of Fabienne Kanou, a graduate student with a genius level IQ, who inexplicably threw her 15-month-old daughter into the sea. During her trial in 2016, Kanou attributed her actions to malevolent forces. Still, maybe two awards were a bit much there as well, especially since Diop, an accomplished documentary director, is not really a first timer.
Of those who missed out, many are likely future awards contenders. Hugh Jackman deftly conveys the difficulties of parenting Melbourne newcomer Zen McGrath in Florian Zeller’s follow-up to The Father, The Son; Brendan Fraser, in his first leading role in nearly a decade, excels as a house-bound 270 kilo online English professor who tries to re-connect with his 17-year-old daughter, played by an excellent Sadie Sink (from Stranger Things) in Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale; trans actress Trace Lysette (Transparent) treads new ground in the remarkable Monica where she returns home to care for her ailing mother (Patricia Clarkson); and Ricardo Darin is a stand-out in the rapturously received Argentina, 1985, which could see itself nominated for Best International Film at the Oscars.
But back to the beginning… Noah Baumbach is a talented filmmaker, yet with the festival’s opening Netflix film, White Noise, which he adapted from Don DeLillo’s 1985 bestselling cult novel — and had been deemed unfilmable — he probably bit off more than he could chew.
Sporting a receding hairline and a paunch, Adam Driver plays a middle-aged father and academic in the film, which focuses on an airborne toxic event and its impact on a small American town in the 1980s. At the film’s press conference, I asked the star and former Marine, who has played muscled characters in Hollywood movies, if it freaked him out when he saw himself on screen.
“I am very satisfied where things are going,” Driver deadpanned, generating a laugh from the crowd. “It was a window into the future, and I am ready. As for the look and the receding hairline, we added that. I put on weight, and we had a back-up stomach and then we didn’t use it! And there was also the wig, which was uncomfortable.”
When I asked Greta Gerwig, who plays his wife (with her own big curly wig) if she thought about casting Driver as her Ken doll in Barbie, Driver fired back cheekily, “Of course!”, which was met with a resounding “No!” from Gerwig.
The Barbie director of course, instead cast Ryan Gosling alongside Margot Robbie as Barbie. Gerwig had famously co-starred with Driver in Baumbach’s fabulous 2012 film Frances Ha. Gerwig and Baumbach have been a couple and collaborators ever since.
The second and third Netflix competition films, Romain Gavras’s Athena and Alejandro Inarritu’s Bardo, failed to generate much excitement (many believe that Inarritu was trying to emulate fellow Mexican Alfonso Cuaron’s success with Roma).
It was left to Andrew Dominik’s Blonde to hold the Netflix fort in the competition. Beautifully shot, the film, based on Joyce Carol Oates’ 2000 novel, blends fact and fiction to reimagine the private and public life of Marilyn Monroe. It was a treat to see on the big screen. Ana de Armas is exceptional as a partly fictionalised version of Marilyn Monroe and while she probably had no hope of winning against the towering Blanchett, the Cuban actress’s performance should figure in the upcoming awards season.
Casey Affleck, one of Dominik’s close friends since they made The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (which like Blonde was produced by Brad Pitt, who also co-starred) was at the festival to promote the out-of-competition Dreamin’ Wild.
“I’ve seen Blonde and it’s incredible,” Affleck said before the film’s premiere. “I’ve seen a couple of versions and it’s taken him a long time to get it out into the world. But that’s just how he is. He’s so slow with it. It’s an amazing, beautiful film.”
In Dreamin’ Wild directed by Bill Pohlad, who had made Love & Mercy about Brian Wilson, Affleck plays real life musician Donnie Emerson, who performs alongside his brother Joe (Walton Goggins) in a duo. The unshowy story of a talented musician whose father (Beau Bridges) sold a lot of his farm to support his son’s ultimately failed music career, suits the Manchester by the Sea Best Actor Oscar winner to a tee.
Affleck, who had premiered his 2010 directing debut, I’m Still Here, starring Joaquin Phoenix in Venice, recognises that having success in filmmaking is a struggle. “When we brought Jesse James here, it had a nice warm reception, but the rest of the world thought it was a total disaster. A failure of an expensive movie. For a while, I thought to myself that my greatest accomplishment is being in the Brad Pitt movie with the lowest box office.”
When it comes to the Oscars and audience approval, the Venice film to watch is probably The Banshees of Inisherin, where for the first time McDonagh returned to the country of his parents’ birth, Ireland, to make a movie. In Venice, he said that he was not so much wanting to do a follow-up to In Bruges – where Farrell and Brendan Gleeson also starred – but to work with the actors again. “I wanted to get those guys back together and it seems incredible that it took 14 years.”
McDonagh had previously struck gold with Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, which premiered in Venice before being nominated for seven Oscars and winning Best Actress for Frances McDormand and Supporting Actor for Sam Rockwell.
