The film festival’s longest-lived veterans are made of wood and stone, and the houses are silent witnesses to film history. Some of them have even played themselves – the bathing huts on the beach at Alberoni on the Lido, for example, were featured in Luchino Visconti’s “Death in Venice”; the photos on the walls of the beach restaurant behind them still tell of this great performance today. Alberoni is at the end of the Lido, but in the film the beach is at the Hotel des Bains. It can no longer even tell of its glory times with photos on the walls, it is dying to itself on the seashore not far from the festival palace, and when you drive past there at night, the moonlight glitters in the windows as if ghosts were walking in the empty corridors, to meet in the park for a haunted party. Under Covid conditions there are no more premiere parties at the festival, but the star cast from Ridley Scott’s “The Last Duel” would have done well on the terrace – Adam Driver, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, all in the same film.
“The Last Duel” is set in the 14th century, but you can hear the echo of “Me Too” right away: Jean de Carrouges (Matt Damon) returns from battle and his wife Marguerite (Jodie Comer) accuses his friend Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver) of rape. The same events can now be seen from three perspectives: Jean and Jacques were friends, went to war together – but the upstart Jacques is a favorite of the count, who gives him parts of Jean’s inheritance. The Count, Pierre, is that comic relief in this scenario – Affleck plays him exactly as he would play any other bitchy bon vivant with too much money who gleefully abuses his power. He then has to pass the rape charges – Jean dragged them to the king. There is testimony against testimony, so the duel should bring a divine judgment.
The men fight their quarrels on the woman’s back – she has the most to lose
With Ridley Scott, the paint is quickly removed from the future, too, and he paints the French knightly castles in such a way that, for heaven’s sake, you wouldn’t want to have been there – drafty and cold, surrounded by a kind of permafrost, arbitrariness and violence, right there it doesn’t, especially not for women. Marguerite has the last word with her version, and especially in the rape scene itself, Scott shows very nicely how nuances change everything: on paper, her description and that of Jacques, who tells himself that she only fought for fun, are almost the same . Only her screams are so shrill, her face, which he cannot see, is so distorted that fun can be ruled out. The men fight on her back, but she risks the most – if Jean loses the fight, she will be burned at the stake on false charges. The reverberation of “Me Too” could also be heard in other films in Venice, for example in “Last Night in Soho” – but Sir Ridley was the only one who hit the tune.
Matt Damon in “The Last Duel”.
(Photo: Fox)
The festival comes to an end with “The Last Duel”; the jury – its president this year is “Parasite” director Bong Joon-ho – can withdraw to make a decision. Ticket sales are approaching the prepandemic level, so there was enough hustle and bustle at the festival. And if there is normal operation in the next year, there will also be a few innovations around the Festival Palace – there is a middle floor in the casino, and where gaming tables once stood there was only a furniture store for a long time. In the meantime, the virtual reality films have moved in there, but next year another location will probably have to be found for them, because an additional cinema is to be built there.
The Biennale has come to terms with the fact that there will be no new building and therefore no film market like in Cannes and Berlin. Somehow it is impossible to imagine that there is still a need for huge new premises – the cinema festivals of the future may be smaller and more concentrated anyway, once the upheaval in the film industry, which has begun digitization and accelerates the pandemic, will be is accomplished. And then not too many smaller companies have fallen by the wayside.
The Polish film “Leave No Traces” is perhaps the most important of the festival
If ever a film has shown how important a diverse film landscape is, in which not only a few large corporations decide what is to be shot, then it is the Polish film in the competition of the 78th Mostra, “Leave No Traces”. Don’t leave any traces, that’s what a supervisor says to a group of police officers who are beating up a boy. Shortly before, they arrested the boy Grzegorz Przemyk and his friend Jurek on the street in Warsaw, the two of them were actually just joking around, Grzegorz then refused to show his ID – martial law, he says, has been suspended. It’s 1983, and director Jan Matuszynski has inscribed that in every image in his film, they are a bit grainier than we are used to today, the colors look washed out. It takes until Grzegorz is finally in the hospital, with a detour through the psychiatry, because the police are trying to prevent a doctor from realizing that he is not drunk but that he has internal injuries. The next day, Grzegorz is dead and his mother and Jurek are determined to bring those guilty to justice.
“Leave No Traces” is based on a real case – for a moment General Jaruzelski and a couple of ministers wonder whether it might not be better to just leave these police officers to their own devices instead of giving the growing freedom movement the opportunity to memorize Grzegorz’s death do, but they are not that smart after all. Matuszynski watches the machine as it mercilessly breaks and bends and corrupts law, and he creates a couple of immensely captivating figures. A public prosecutor, for example, who has no heart and no taste in choosing her eyeshadow. Hardly any other film at this festival has as much relevance to the present as “Leave No Traces” – in Poland and elsewhere. Freedom and justice are inextricably linked.