by Helen Barlow
This year’s Venice Film Festival may have boasted an unprecedented number of Hollywood stars, though many of their films met with mixed reviews. Some of the smaller films proved more satisfying.
THE BIGGIES (with no prizes)
Joker: Folie à Deux screened in competition, but unlike 2019’s Joker, which won the Golden Lion, it failed to take away an award. Critics ravaged the film and while it’s probably criminal that Lady Gaga doesn’t have enough to do, it’s just a different kind of story. The original Oscar-winning Joker was more a comic book experience, whereas the new film focuses on the inner life of the Arthur Fleck/Joker character and Joaquin Phoenix is exceptional.
Apple’s Wolfs screened out-of-competition, though if a prize was given for red carpet shenanigans, the film’s stars, George Clooney and Brad Pitt, would have won. Unfortunately, director Jon Watts failed to completely translate his stars’ charisma into a satisfying film. Clooney, who says he is now focusing on acting rather than directing (Phew!) plays a crime fixer hired to clean up a high-profile crime, only to discover that Pitt has also been hired. So, they have to work together. Seeing the good friends on screen is fun enough, but the film is not a patch on their previous film, the Coen Brothers’ Burn After Reading, which also premiered in Venice, in 2008. They of course also appeared in Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven, Ocean’s Twelve and Ocean’s Thirteen.
Angelina Jolie’s turn as Maria Callas in Maria, Chilean director Pablo Larrain’s third dreary biopic of a famous woman after Jackie and Spencer, failed to live up to Fanny Ardant’s mesmeric performance in 2002’s Callas Forever, which also focused on the opera singer’s final days.
Like Maria, Luca Guadagnino’s Queer screened in competition and wasn’t awarded a prize, even if critics deemed that Daniel Craig delivers one of his best performances. The former James Bond plays a kind of surrogate William S. Burroughs in a story based on the writer’s quasi-autobiographical novella, first written in 1952 and published in 1985. As in many of Burroughs’ stories, his William Lee alter ego is a heroin addict and here lives in Mexico City where he is infatuated with a young American, Eugene Allerton, played by Drew Starkey and inspired by Adelbert Lewis Marker, who was 21 when he and Burroughs met. The wealthy Lee convinces Allerton to accompany him to the Amazon in search of a drug called yage and this is where the film becomes unwieldy. Essentially it is a story of unrequited love.
THE STRONG SMALLER FILMS
In the Horizons section, with the jury headed by Debra Granik (Winter’s Bone), Familiar Touch was a dual award winner for America’s Sarah Friedland, who won for best director as well as for best debut film, while Kathleen Chalfant [above] also won for best actress. A dementia story that doesn’t take itself too seriously, the film is a moving portrait of a woman adjusting to life in an upscale assisted living facility in Los Angeles.
In Horizons Extra, Iranian director Nader Saeivar won the Armani Beauty Audience Award for the German-Austrian film, The Witness, which he shot in Iran. Saeivar, who currently lives in Berlin, wrote the screenplay with his regular collaborator, Jafar Panahi, who is unable to leave Iran. Veteran actress Maryam Boubani is remarkable as a retired teacher taking on the regime following the murder of a young woman she considers a daughter. The film can be viewed as a companion piece to Cannes prize winner and Germany’s international film Oscar nominee, The Seed of the Sacred Fig directed by Mohammad Rasoulof, who also now resides in Berlin.
September 5 by Swiss director Tim Fehlbaum was a festival breakout hit. It follows a different approach to Steven Spielberg’s Munich in examining the terrorist attack at the 1972 Olympics by focusing on an American ABC TV crew covering the games. The network was the first to broadcast an act of terrorism live. Peter Sarsgaard (last year’s Venice best actor winner for Michel Franco’s dementia drama, Memory) plays the man in charge, the real-life Roone Arledge, who was applauded for his work and quick thinking.
Kevin Macdonald’s Oscar-winning 1999 documentary, One Day in September, also focused on the Munich massacre. The prolific Scotsman, who recently released documentaries on John Galliano and Kyiv mayor and former boxing champion, Vitali Klitschko, now turns his eye to John Lennon and Yoko Ono in One to One: John & Yoko, co-directed by his editor Sam Rice-Edwards. Who could imagine the famous couple sitting in bed and watching TV news coverage, panel shows, game shows, sitcoms and advertisements? Given Lennon’s obsession with American television, Macdonald imagines just that, in recreated scenes in their tiny Greenwich apartment in 1971 and 1972. The film, which gives Ono her due, focuses on the couple as advocates of the people, as they staged a benefit concert, One to One, for special needs children at Madison Square Garden in 1972. Ultimately, it was Lennon’s final live show and his first since performing with The Beatles in 1966. The film also includes a collection of unseen material from the Lennon archives, including personal phone calls and home movies filmed by the couple.
Another Beatles-oriented film, Romanian documentary filmmaker Andrei Ujica‘s TWST Things We Said Today, starts out focusing on The Fab Four at the time of their second trip to America in 1965 when the country was in the throes of Beatlemania. Their concert at Shea Stadium in New York was record-breaking. The film then turns into an ode to New York at the time with stunning black-and-white footage and combines the videos of a girl heading to the concert, as well as animation.
Long before Roberto Benigni’s holocaust comedy-drama Life is Beautiful (where Benigni famously won the best actor Oscar in 1999), Jerry Lewis had tried to make something similar, The Day the Clown Cried in 1972, about a German circus clown in a concentration camp. Yet the film was never finished, or released, due to licensing issues. Michael Lurie and Eric Friedler (who was born in Sydney and now lives in Hamburg, Germany) have made a documentary about the ill-fated production, From Darkness to Light. Martin Scorsese, who directed Lewis (and Robert De Niro) in 1982’s The King of Comedy, is interviewed for the film, which also includes archival interviews with Lewis.
Errol Morris [above], a formidable documentary filmmaker with a political bent, premiered Separated which is based on reporter Jacob Soboroff’s book. A powerful recounting of how President Donald Trump’s administration separated children from their parents at the US-Mexico border, to discourage future immigrants from coming to America, the film provides an incisive account of how the policy was devised, implemented and ultimately stopped by Trump in 2018. In Venice, Morris said how he hoped his film would be shown as the US election approaches. At the end of the film, one of Trump’s acolytes suggests that the heinous policy may be re-introduced should Trump regain the Presidency, while Trump (away from the film) has said that if he wins re-election in November, he has left the door open to resume separations. It’s a very scary thought.
Japanese cult director Takeshi Kitano, who won the Golden Lion in 1997 for Hana-Bi (Fireworks) proves that he’s still a filmmaking force with Broken Rage, a one-hour film he made for Amazon. The 77-year-old was mobbed at his film’s press conference by a swathe of young fans, as his young Japanese security guards in sharp black suits attempted to keep them at bay. Returning to play his trademark gangster, Kitano has split the film in two – one, the story of his success as a hitman and then a second section where he is in slapstick mode and stuffs it up. His regular actor Tadanobu Asano (his co-star in 2003’s fabulous Zatoichi and Emmy-nominated for Shogun) is a detective on his tail. The film includes interludes of social media chat with people critiquing the film, to hilarious effect.
