Cool thoughts on the latest films seen and the Lions awarded at the 80th Venice Film Festival
-Where the hell are you?
– Well, I have my own life, you know, what do you think?
– Ha ha ha, I have no doubt about it, but you left me in limbo, without saying anything more about the latest films in the competition, or about the forecasts, which are now long outdated.
“I willingly let them expire.” Just like it’s all expired now Venice. We hardly talk about this anymore. To see the Golden Lion, the general public will have to wait until the next Carnival, you understand?
– Indeed, it has never been clear why so much time should pass between the appearance of a film at a festival, a possible award and its release in cinemas. January 25, who remembers “Poor Creatures!”, the director’s new film Yorgos Lanthimos winner of the Venice Film Festival’s top award almost four months earlier?
“And when I talk about it here and now, I feel like I’m behaving like a privileged white supremacist male who has already seen and heard everything there is to see and hear.
– Now don’t make excuses… At least tell me what the films of the last days were like.
– Here you see? I have a hole in my memory. I don’t remember them anymore…
– You should have seen the new one Garroneif I’m not mistaken…
– Yes, sure. The magnificent “Io Capitano”, which in the blink of an eye rose to the top of my Lido ranking and became the Golden Lion of the heart of this Venice.
– Nevertheless, he won silver. So he came very close.
– Of course, but although the jury’s verdict this year was less disastrous than usual, I would take into account two things: first, that we are in Italy, and if at least one of the six (and I mean six!) Italians The films in competition are work of this caliber, so you’re doing me a favor by giving it the top award. It’s not parochialism, and maybe it will be, but who cares: “The Poor People” (or “The Poor People!” as it will be called when it comes out next year) is certainly a stunning, phantasmagoric, eccentric film, stunningly aesthetically handsome, funny, witty, provocative, in short, he has everything to rise to the heights of the Oscar and get a “one”, but… this is also a demonstration that with “The Favourite” Lanthimos has now chosen the path of pyrotechnic divertissement and kaleidoscopic, in pursuit of success I I don’t mean “light”, but certainly guaranteed by its ability to capture the appetites of demanding, cultured, sophisticated viewers, ready to be overwhelmed by the whirlwind of details and jokes filling the screen, rather than from the dramatic depths of undoubtedly more complex and demanding works such as ” Sacrifice of the Sacred Deer.” How could I turn my nose up at reimagining out of thin air a grotesque and creative universe that sweeps away – as I told you last time – the gimmicky and false trappings of Tim Burton-style gothic horror? The desire to have fun at the movies is more than legitimate, in fact, I would argue that “entertainment” should be the goal of every artistic and creative discipline. But when the games stop, a flesh meteorite falls from the sky and the feeling of “I am Captain” falls from the sky, the whole world is forced to kneel to make way.
– But is “I am the captain” so good? From what I hear around, it doesn’t even sound like a Garrone film…
– And here people are mistaken, making the classic mistake of many when preparing to watch a new film by an author they already know: they “expect” to see something that they already have a clear idea about in their head. , developed on the basis of the previous films of this author, and if they then see – as happens most often with “great authors” – something completely different, then they blame it all on the inadequacy of the director, who “This time no, no, he really did it Didn’t understand”. The most unusual and bewildering quality of “Io Capitano” is not actually the horror story of the journey of hope of two Senegalese boys from Dakar to the Sicilian coast in search of the kind of happiness that hundreds of foreign migrants come to seek every week. Italy and Europe: after all, newspapers, television and even movies have been telling us about this for many years with mixed results. What Garrone does this time is a titanic gesture of humility, a humility that we are not used to recognizing in “Great Authors”, deliberately because we want them to be great, recognizable, convinced and shining like beacons pointing direction without reservation: Garrone lays down “his” cinema and decides to adopt the simplest and most direct tones of a cinema “for everyone”, that is, one that reaches the heart of any person without having to sift through his intellectual veins. The narrative style is classic, empathy for the faces and bodies of the main characters has an all-encompassing adherence to the concepts of “life” and “death”, “mother”, “friendship”, “pain”, “mother”. torture, “labor”, “human dignity” are clearly expressed in cinematic terms that have no accent, no rhetoric in their very DNA, and therefore capture our hearts only and exclusively thanks to the quality of the view of those who decided to talk about them without filters and additives . The naturalness with which Garrone inserts dreamlike, dreamy sequences into the flow of images surrounds “I Am Captain” with a fairy-tale aura and turns it into an epic poem for children, which therefore already considers “history” what happens and happens. shown to you, transformed here, and finally in a performance that is itself a meeting of the cultures involved, “ours” and “theirs”, aptly expressed in a universality of recognizable features that should be the envy of many cool directors, especially if the Italians who first in attics and terraces, and then on the film screens of the Festival, they always put the toothbrush above everything else that can be told in the world…
“So silver isn’t enough for you?”
– No, this is not enough for me. Moreover, in Venice there are two Silver Lions, one for directing, which Garrone won (and which, for the visual invention and care for the formal packaging of “Poor Little Things,” could easily have gone to Lanthimos), and the other “Special Grand Jury Prize”: which one two will be the most important? So who was second and who was third? Secrets of the lagoon…
– What did Holland win then?
– You took the “Special Jury Prize” with your “Green Border”, and this is more than fourth place, and you die.
– Did you see this?
– No. I’ve seen at least four films in my life. Agnieszka Holland, everything is mediocre on average. I had to choose between resting and getting up early to get it done, and I chose to sleep. They told me that everyone cried at the screening. I give the benefit of the doubt. Then you know, Venice is also Harry’s Bar, La Fenice, Exhibitions, Museums, Churches full of wonders… Therefore, I also refused the “Big” special prize that was awarded. Hamaguchi Ryusuke.
– Why did you skip this on purpose?
– Because the highly hyped “Ride My Car” seemed unbearable to me, obviously an Oscar for a foreign film. This is the curse of us born against the grain: we do not do it on purpose; This is how they paint us…
– What other awards did you agree to?
– The Women’s Volpi Cup touched me very much. Cailee Spaeny, “Priscilla” by Sofia Coppola: so young, but already able to enjoy her femininity to achieve any goal while remaining intact. I liked the men’s one too Peter Sarsgaard for “Memory” by Michel Franco, which, however, I admit, I glimpsed in a semi-conscious state due to the fatigue of the last days. But I will want to watch it again because I am convinced that it is a good film. The award for the screenplay for the vampire film El Conde was excellent. Pablo Larrain: In a Facebook post published when the film was released, I compared it in literary quality to Adelphi’s book: I’d say I was very captivated by it. …But the most just and sacred award that he left to everyone present, in the hall or to those who watched the award ceremony live, the most noticeable scratch of this entire 80th film festival is “Mastroianni” Seydou Sarr, the boy protagonist of Io Capitano. Stripping “films” of their status as plots, running time, editing and live action, it was undoubtedly the most moving cinematic moment to be seen at the Lido. Almost a sequel to I Am Captain itself, whose finale takes place on the high seas, here it culminates perfectly with the emotions of an Olympic hero being honored on the winner’s podium.
– Does this short fairy tale end like this?
– I have something to add, some good, others much less: these are always proposals that readers and viewers will evaluate, accept or reject. Two films. Let’s start with the least successful: Lubo, the sixth and last Italian film in competition that year. Giorgio Diritti which, after The Wind Makes his Tour, included a sporadic series of titles that, in my opinion, are undeservedly glorified. But that’s my personal problem with his cinema: it eludes me. These three hours of “Lyubo”, which features a very fashionable actor today, the German Franz Rogowski, are gloomy and sleepy, like a Swiss television drama of the 90s, and dilute the strength of the dramaturgy of “Lyubo”. Jenish,” a nomadic population known as “white gypsies,” victims of an insane law that in the 1930s involved taking children away from their parents in the name of banning all minors from living on the streets. Instead, I’ll end on a high note by loudly recommending a film that charmed almost all of us (“almost” because there’s always some cynical bird out there catching owls) on the Lido. This is a film by a superb French director, known and loved for the cinematic energy with which he stages political dramas or harrowing family affairs. Stefan Brize exploded at Cannes with The Law of the Market in 2015 and opened (speaking for myself) the following year in Venice with a marvelous big-screen adaptation of Guy de Maupassant’s La Vie (it was like watching family home movies shot in the 19th century with a handheld video camera. ..). This year he once again surprised us all (“almost all”, oh well) “Hors-Saison” (“Out of Season”: could there be a more beautiful name?) – yes, minimalistic, ironic, slightly “sentimental” comedy”. , but ready to crack like candy between your teeth to spread the bitter and stunning taste of disappointment across your palate. Perhaps a film that, along with Saverio Costanzo’s “Finamente l’alba”, Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla”, Woody Allen’s “Coup de chance”, Travis Scott’s “Zion” in Harmony Korine’s “Aggro Dr1ft” and the scene of the dispute between Leonard Bernstein and his I will keep my wife in Bradley Cooper’s “Maestro” among the most intimate and unforgettable memories of all this Venice of the 80s.