Reviews of “Ghosts in Venice” and “El Conde”

Agatha Christie’s The Halloween Party, published in 1969, is set in the fictional town of Woodley Common, a “common place” thirty or forty miles from London. Thanks to director Kenneth Branagh and his screenwriter Michael Green, the book became a new film, The Haunting of Venice, and the action moved to Italy in 1947. Now This the adaptation is a bolder metamorphosis than anything explored by Branagh and Greene in Murder on the Orient Express (2017) or Death on the Nile (2022). I’m already looking forward to their next Christie remake: “Body in the Library”, perhaps transferred to the Walmart freezer section.

Branagh returns as Hercule Poirot, who has retreated to the Venetian citadel. There, ignoring the pleas of annoying people who pester him with their personal secrets, he tends his garden, examining his plants through a magnifying glass, as if identifying the culprit aphids. A local heavyweight named Portfolio (Riccardo Scamarcio), who sounds like a stockbroker but is actually a former police officer, acts as the gatekeeper. The only outsider he allows in is Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey), an aspiring crime novelist. She convinces the detective to accompany her to a seance where the famous medium Mrs. Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh) will make contact with the other world. Ariadne’s plan is that Poirot, as an arch-rationalist, will refute the claims of the paranormal. And Branagh’s plan, as a cunning director, is to expose them to the fullest.

So get ready for all the tricks. A palazzo said to be haunted and currently occupied by operatic soprano Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly), who hasn’t sung a note since her daughter Alicia (Rowan Robinson) fell into a canal and drowned. A parrot named Harry who kept his beak closed for the same reason. The housekeeper (Camille Cotten), accustomed to speaking Latin, alone has access to her daughter’s room. A British doctor (Jamie Dornan) traumatized by his wartime experiences. Handsome and reliably vacant scoundrel (Kyle Allen) who was once engaged to Alicia and left her, apparently for money, which seems fair enough to me. Hidden basement full of skeletons. Knitted rabbit. Missing bees. A typewriter whose keys press themselves. A night storm so strong that when death strikes, the police cannot reach the scene, meaning Poirot must lock everyone up and…my God

– solve the crime before breakfast.

I remember being scared by Halloween Party when I read it as a child because the first victim was child: a girl of twelve or thirteen years of age whose head was dipped in a bucket of water while she was catching apples. (Christie could be cruel when she wanted to if the entertainment went wrong.) As if by way of redemption, the most interesting figure in “The Haunting of Venice” is another child – Leopold, the doctor’s son, played by Jude. Hill, who was the scoundrel at the center of Branagh’s Belfast (2021). Here the Hill is cleared of all attractiveness; instead he presents us with a sort of precocious mini-Poirot, dressed solemnly in a dark suit and tie. Leopold cares for his shaking father, reads Edgar Allan Poe, and when asked about his sympathy for the dead, replies, “Some of them are my friends.” He and the boy from The Sixth Sense (1999) will have a lot to talk about.

For constitutionally gentle people like Leopold, nothing can surpass the gloomy Venice. “The most beautiful of tombs,” Henry James called it, and I have always been struck by its reputation as a romantic retreat. How can you spend your honeymoon in a city that is in a state of decay and decline? Remember Joseph Losey, who took the Hollywood potboiler “Eve” by James Hadley Chase and, like Branagh, moved the plot to Venice. The result was Eva (1962), a monument to disillusionment in which Jeanne Moreau, as a carefree hedonist, left her lover with her dignity drained and her heart broken. Part of the film takes place on Torcello in winter, far from the dazzling Grand Canal.

If every Venetian story has been told, and every sight has been exhaustively documented in print or painting, what can Ghosts in Venice add to the mix? It’s only been a couple of months since Hayley Atwell and Rebecca Ferguson were busy fighting a villain on one of the city’s bridges in the latest Mission: Impossible, and there’s nothing in Venice’s mourning of drowned daughters to rival “Don.” Don’t Look Now” (1973). And yet there is a charm of incongruous excess to Branagh’s film: stylistic excesses are heaped into a treasure trove of gothic camp, and the camera is tilted, no matter the provocation, at the most alarming angles – Dutch angles, as they are called in the trade. If you really want to feel at home, Mister Poirot, forget about Venice. Let’s go to Amsterdam!

According to historical records, Augusto Pinochet, who came to power in Chile after a military coup fifty years ago, was born in 1915 and died in 2006. According to El Conde, on the contrary, the new Chilean-produced film Directed by Pablo Larraín, Pinochet has been around for centuries. He started out as Claude Pinoch, a young French officer in Louis XVI’s army who witnessed the excesses of the French Revolution at close range—so close that after Marie Antoinette’s execution, he sneaked up to the guillotine and licked her blood. from the blade. You see, this was no ordinary beast. He was a vampire.

This is precisely the concept at the heart of this unusual film. Tracing the course of Pinochet’s atrocities, he is transported into the modern era, quickly passing through his dictatorial reign and sitting on his coffin as he lies in state. In the small window one can see the peaceful visage of the deceased, who opens his eyes and looks furtively, clearly wanting to rise again and resume his thirsty craft. Simple blood, we learn, does not satisfy Pinochet’s discerning tastes; instead, he rips out the hearts of his victims, places them in a blender, and drinks the liquefied liquid. Apart from a last-minute coda, El Conde (The Count) is entirely black and white. The blood is dark as pitch.

The bulk of the story takes place on a remote Chilean ranch. The only occupants are Pinochet (Jaime Wadell), his wife Lucia Hiriart (Gloria Munchmeyer) and their servant Fyodor (Alfredo Castro), who takes great pride in chronicling his sadism during the junta. . To this desolate place, like the five children of Pinochet, who profess a faint love for their father, but are mainly after his money. An accountant named Carmencita (Paula Luchsinger) arrives to sort out the family finances, particularly the funds that have been hidden away like squirrel nuts. However, Carmencita has a secret plan; she is a nun in civilian attire, and her suitcase is filled with exorcist tools. The stakes are high.

Despite the vampires, no one in the film makes a more striking impression than Luchsinger. Short-haired, sharp-featured, round-eyed and radiant, she exudes a warrior’s innocence. However, her character’s purpose becomes dangerously blurred, and the core of the plot begins to feel sluggish and unfocused. The more Larraín tries to grab your attention with moral grotesqueries while the Pinochets argue over an undead legacy, the less inclined you are to give in. I suspect “El Conde” is a one-trick story. The image of the tyrant as a true bloodsucker rather than a cruel conqueror of his countrymen would be food and drink (especially drink) for a political cartoonist, but it has no narrative power to match its satirical edge. Few jokes, no matter how strong and powerful, can be told over and over again without starting to fade.

The film is narrated in the unmistakable tone of Margaret Thatcher (Stella Gonet), who plans to make a guest appearance in later stages. It is true that after Pinochet was charged with human rights abuses in 1998 and placed under house arrest in Britain, Thatcher (and George HW Bush) argued that he should be released. However, anyone who watched El Conde and knew little about the period would get the impression that she was less an ally of Pinochet and more his monstrous girlfriend – even perhaps his boss – with her own wild tastes. Like him, she flies serenely across the vast gray sky, her cape spread over the wing of a bat. Being a lady, she drinks blood from a porcelain cup as if it were Earl Gray tea.

The fact that Thatcher, unlike Pinochet, was fairly elected and that she ran a country in which you could call the prime minister a vampire without being thrown out of a helicopter or beaten to a pulp may be too fine and too boring a distinction. bother Larraín. It’s a curious case that his work has gotten dumber, not wiser, with age. The baroque paranoia of Jackie (2016), Spencer (2021) and El Conde, filled with conspiracy nightmares, is less convincing than the insistence of NO (2012). It was Larraín’s best film, firmly rooted in the campaign to defeat Pinochet in the 1988 referendum and filled with ordinary Chileans who had suffered more than enough and rallied to come back. Where are these people in El Conde? Who wants a movie where it’s almost all predators and not a word from their prey? ♦