So many great films: the Venice Film Festival – Culture

When twenty films compete against each other, ideally you learn a little about the world. In any case, you learn something about the state of the cinema. Some of it remains a bit mysterious, for example why all sorts of films from different corners of the world are in competition at the 80th Venice Film Festival, from Agnieszka Holland’s “Green Border” to Bradley Cooper’s “Maestro” and Pablo Larrain’s “El Conde” to Timm Kröger’s ” The Theory of Everything” was shot in whole or in part in black and white. It worked in all cases, but why this accumulation? At the end of this competition it is clear: If such a series of great films is possible in a single summer, the cinema cannot be doing completely badly. The festival lost most of its stars for the red carpet due to the strike, but that wasn’t all that important.

The favorite after just a few days was “Poor Things” by Yorgos Lanthimos. What’s loved outside doesn’t always appeal to the jury. This year’s, which included Damien Chazelle and Laura Poitras and Jane Campion and Mia Hansen Love, won him anyway. You could say: your head was out in the world and your heart was in the cinema. “Poor Things” won the top prize, the Golden Lion, on Saturday evening, and that may just be the beginning. Emma Stone plays Bella, who is the crazy Dr. Baxter (Willem Dafoe) made from the body of a suicidal woman and the brain of a child, and then dances on the noses of all the men who want to mold her. It’s her film, said Lanthimos at the awards ceremony. Of course, the feminist Frankenstein fantasy he created is still a little bit his.

Venice has lived up to its reputation as the festival where most Oscar contenders celebrate their premieres. In addition to “Poor Things,” this also applies above all to Michael Mann’s “Ferrari” with Adam Driver and Penelope Cruz. The Silver Lion went to an Oscar winner from last year. In 2022, the Japanese Ryusuke Hamaguchi was honored for his film “Drive My Car”. Now he has a well-deserved second place in Venice with “Evil Does Not Exist”. It’s about a small village in the countryside where people are very at one with nature, until people from a company in Tokyo show up who want to open a luxury campsite there. The focus is on a single father and his little daughter, for whom he would like to preserve the forests and meadows. “Evil Does Not Exist” is a political film, but one made with so much care and dedication that each shot could stand on its own. No filmmaker has ever portrayed his tiredness of late capitalism more poetically than Hamaguchi.

Hamaguchi literally looks for big politics at the grassroots. The two big refugee epics in the competition were more striking, and the fact that they both received prizes is certainly politically mean on the part of the jury. The directing award went to one of the Italian competition entries, “Io Capitano” by Matteo Garrone (“Gomorrah”), which follows two boys from Senegal who, against all good advice, set out for Europe and initially only end up in an internment camp. “Green Border” by Agnieszka Holland received the jury’s special prize. Your film takes place on the border between Poland and Belarus, not only among refugees, but also among the activists who are ready to help them against any resistance. She then dedicated her prize to them. In the film they have a lot to do with the fact that this terrible story, in which a political, often deadly game is played with people, can be endured better than Garrone’s film: she has found a little light between the shadows. It’s a bit of a shame that there wasn’t more in it for “Green Border”, because Agnieszka Holland is quite merciless in holding up a mirror to the European Union.

Not all films from the USA are affected by the strike

And it’s a bit like that in the end it was an American-dominated festival despite the absences due to the strike. “Poor Things” is a film produced in Great Britain with American actors and American money, Pablo Larrain’s Pinochet vampire film “El Conde”, which won best screenplay, is a Netflix film, and the two acting awards also went to US films. Actor. This is quite good for the striking writers and actors in the USA. The strategy of allowing actors from independent productions to appear at the festival, even though they are not supposed to advertise films until the end of the negotiations, has worked.

Also for Cailee Spaeny, who received the Coppa Volpi for best actress. In Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla” she plays the young Priscilla Beaulieu Presley, who is still a child when she meets the great Elvis, marries, and then, very calmly and slowly, transforms into an adult looking forward to the rock star life thankfully waived. She didn’t do a bad job, but actually the award would probably have gone to Jessica Chastain for “Memory”, for which her co-star Peter Sarsgaard, quite rightly, won the award for best male actor. Both came, as did Spaeny; the films were exempt from union requirements. “Memory” by Michel Franco is an independently produced film that is not affected by the strike by US actors and writers. Although Franco’s film takes place in New York, he himself is Mexican.

“Memory” is about child abuse that has been cruelly swept under the rug. Jessica Chastain plays a woman who lacks any sense of security. She meets a man (Peter Sarsgaard) who she initially thinks she recognizes as a former tormentor. That’s not true, and she falls in love with him, even though, or perhaps because, he suffers from dementia. Franco brings together different types of forgetting, repression and false memory and weaves them into a touching story that Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard make a great film. “Memory” is also definitely one of the films that will play a role at the Oscars. But there are worse things to say about a festival than that it’s an Oscar springboard.