by Helen Barlow
“Oh shit!” Jim Jarmusch said, clearly stunned, as he received The Venice Film Festival’s top honour, The Golden Lion, for Father Mother Sister Brother, a triptych that features Cate Blanchett, Vicky Krieps and Charlotte Rampling. “All of us here who make films, we’re not motivated by competition, but I truly appreciate this unexpected honour,” Jarmusch said.
The youthful 72-year-old had been called back to accept an award, though he wasn’t expecting to receive the Golden Lion for his understated, gently humorous film.
Franco-Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab, about a five-year old Palestinian girl who lived on the Gaza Strip and was killed by the IDF during the Israeli invasion, had been the frontrunner. The film ultimately came in second, winning the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize.
Jury head Alexander Payne at a press conference after the awards said that there had been “two films that most moved us, they were the two films that frankly made us cry. And they were the two films that we thought were the clearest expressions and cries of humanity.”
The two winners bonded over receiving their awards, with Ben Hania noting how she had seen all of Jarmusch’s films, while the American director was clearly supportive of the Paris-based director’s film, as he wore a badge saying “Enough” with the design of the Palestinian keffiyeh in the background.
Benny Safdie emerged as the best director winner for The Smashing Machine, the story of Mark Kerr, one of the most successful mixed martial arts fighters of the late 1990s. Dwayne Johnson, who plays him, will surely figure in the upcoming awards season, as will Emily Blunt who plays his long-suffering girlfriend.
The dark comedy Bugonia sees Yorgos Lanthimos return to his more absurdist ways. The film could well be up for awards, especially for Jesse Plemons’s portrayal as a struggling beekeeper and conspiracy theorist, who together with his cousin, kidnaps Emma Stone’s wealthy CEO believing that she is an alien.
It has been 25 years since four-time Oscar nominee Julia Roberts won the world’s most prestigious gong for Erin Brockovich. At the Venice premiere of her new film, Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt, much was expected as it will soon open the New York Film Festival. Roberts plays a Yale philosophy professor who must deal with her star pupil making a sexual accusation against one of her male colleagues. She must also confront a potential revelation of a dark secret from her past which reflects on the situation.
Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite is an edge-of-the-seat thriller about a nuclear missile headed for the US and how the authorities deal with it. Aussie Jason Clarke, who also appeared in Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, is a stand-out as Admiral Mark Miller, though Idris Elba as the American President copped a drubbing with Variety’s Owen Gleiberman writing that he “does not give a good performance”.
Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is lavish, told from the perspectives of Oscar Isaac’s Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi’s Creature. Elordi is bound to be an awards contender.
Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly is highly commercial and for many seemed a strange selection for the Venice competition. Strong awards contender Adam Sandler steals the film from George Clooney, who plays the titular character, a swooning movie star in the Cary Grant mould whose star is fading, with Sandler’s manager having to deal with him. The film is funny as well as poignant.
Denmark’s The Last Viking, screening out of competition, was a breath of fresh air in that it’s an all-out comedy that also works on many levels and had audiences reeling with laughter. Director Anders Thomas Jensen (Riders of Justice) re-teams with his regular collaborators Mads Mikkelsen and Nikolaj Lie Kaas for a story about Manfred (Mikkelsen, funnier than we’ve ever seen him) who has developed a mental disorder and has forgotten where he buried the loot from a robbery that his brother (Lie Kaas) has just served time for committing.
The festival’s closing film, the futuristic dystopian thriller, Dog 51, by French action director Cedric Jimenez is likewise one to look out for. The €40-million adrenalin-charged Paris-set film (financed by Canal+ and Netflix) stars Jimenez’s regular collaborators Gilles Lellouche and Adele Exarchopoulos as cops trying to hunt down a killer as they battle the all-controlling ALMA, a powerful predictive AI which has revolutionised the police system. Jimenez makes Paris look like something out of Blade Runner.
While many expected Francois Ozon’s adaptation of Albert Camus’s novel The Stranger to win a prize, perhaps Benjamin Voisin for best actor, the French film went away empty-handed. Local Italian hero Toni Servillo won the best actor Volpi Cup for Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grazia.
Italian-born, Paris-based Valeria Bruni Tedeschi was widely fancied for best actress for her astounding performance in Duse about Italian theatre star Eleanora Duse. Instead, Chinese actress Xin Zhilei won for The Sun Rises on Us All about a woman trying to make amends with her former lover, who served time in prison for a crime she had committed.
