Povere Creature!, Dogman, The Green Border and, for Italy, Io Capitano ed Enea. This could be the fifth possible TotoLeone of the 80th Venice Film Festival, which closes on Saturday. And all this with one important thing in mind: Damien Chazelle, born in 1985 and winner of the Oscar for La La Land, is the youngest chairman of the festival jury since its inception.
Meanwhile, it is impossible to imagine that Poor creatures! do not score goals, or rather do not enter this year’s palmares. In any case, the problem is different, who will be awarded the prize? The incredible Emma Stone or the movie? The actress is brilliant as Bella Baxter, a woman brought back to life with a brain implant as a child, making her a “very pretty retarded”, pure being who naturally discovers sexuality.
A girl who knows nothing about conventions and rules and therefore sleeps with everyone with the enthusiasm of a little girl in a toy store.
“Where there is an unfortunate man, God sends him a dog.” This haunting line from de Lamartine introduces Luc Besson’s “Dog Man,” a black fable starring Douglas (the eclectic and always Luciferian Caleb Landry Jones of the Volpi Cup) as a boy locked up in a cage full of dogs by an abusive father. was a child. Having lost the ability to fully use his legs, Douglas becomes more and more of a Joker and, disguised as a woman (a way to protect himself), finds himself living in a wheelchair surrounded by his faithful dogs (about fifty) able to protect him, like all “accidents” . , To commit a crime. Instead, immigration, signed by Agnieszka Holland, takes center stage in Green Frontier. In the film, shot in secret and divided into chapters, the director occasionally tells the story of a Syrian refugee family fleeing ISIS, an Afghan English teacher, a young border guard, and a group of volunteers who try to help put themselves at risk every day. The green border we are talking about is the Polish-Belarusian one. In this no man’s land, migrants are exploited, beaten, abandoned and, above all, thrown from one place to another without ever finding a place to land.
On the Italian front, represented by no less than six titles in the competition, captain Garrone excels with pole position. Everything speaks in favor of this film, from the hot topic of migrating by sea from Libya to Italy, to the story of two minors who stay clean despite a hellish journey to a ramshackle boat. However, Pietro Castellitto’s Aeneas may be dominated by the freshness and authorship of a film that remains a Martian in the weary panorama of a certain Italian cinema. A man in his thirties who talks about his generation is a rarity in Italy. In the case of Castellitto, it is about the life of Aeneas, a good boy from Rome, legally bored and the perfect mixture of a spoiled boy, but full of philosophical principles and able to visit the most exclusive club on the Tiber, its troubled middle. Family class and drug dealers.
Then they could find a place among the awards of Maestro Bradley Cooper, a biopic about Leonard Bernstein, the first great American-born conductor and also, apparently, an outstanding musician. The film may qualify for the Volpi Cup, which will go to Cooper himself (who plays Bernstein), but even more so to Carey Mulligan, who plays his beloved wife Felicia Montealegre, who gives the film a creepy hospital scene. A chance also for the Oscar-winning Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s Nature Symphony (“Ride My Car”), which led to the Lido. The Devil Doesn’t Exist, or the story of a mountain village that opposes the construction of a glamping, luxury camping site that he would like to build. bring wealth, but upset the precarious balance of the area. Only two films are missing: The Woman by Michał Englert and Małgorzata Szumowska, the story of a man living in the wrong body, and finally Michel Franko’s Memory, which tells about a couple in love and troubled.
A side consideration: this year the criterion for the number of applause, which is generally rare at festivals (even here in Venice, it was so), did not work: everyone applauded, so it is useless to rely on it.
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