Fear gives you wings. At least that’s what director Lola Cuevas (Penélope Cruz) believes, as she places the two main actors of her next film, Félix (Antonio Banderas) and Ivan (Oscar Martínez) under a floating rock during a rehearsal before filming, for inspiration. You can hear the crane screeching, only the two men are not inspired, but rigid with fear. “Competencia oficial” is a comedy about filmmaking – wonderfully self-deprecatingly, three classic types of cinema are poked fun at by people who should know: Penélope Cruz’s director is bitchy and pretentious, Banderas is the superstar you never know about whether he is hollowheaded or devious, and the third member, Oscar Martínez, excuses his lack of success with the stupidity of the audience.
One of the best moments is when you want to cry and Antonio Banderas scuttles to his pocket like a ballerina and in childlike triumph brings to light a small green bottle: “Menthol! Always helps.” Lola growls: Not in my film. “Competencia oficial”, staged by the Argentine directing duo Gastón Duprat and Mariano Cohn, is definitely the funniest thing the competition at the Venice Film Festival has to offer this year. And the easiest.
Jamie Lee Curtis is honored for her life’s work and introduces the horror film “Halloween Kills”
The 78th Mostra could actually be a comparatively fear-free place, the festival takes place under strict Covid conditions – only every second place is occupied, all of their masks are kept on during the screenings, is actually enforced in the cinemas – and there is an outbreak it has not yet existed. On the canvases, however, naked horror reigns supreme. Maybe festival director Alberto Barbera thinks that a little splatter right after breakfast is the best way to wake up the guests of the rather tightly packed festival program every day in the second week. If the films that made it into the official selection are, however, a mirror of the general state of the world, the world will suffer from worse paralysis than Antonio Banderas under the rock.
The actress Jamie Lee Curtis was honored for her life’s work in Venice.
(Photo: YARA NARDI / REUTERS)
There are two types of horror that come together in competition. Real horror films, which goes well with the fact that scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis was honored with a lion for her life’s work on Wednesday night at the premiere of David Gordon Green’s “Halloween Kills”, which is based on the old “Halloween” films . And the horror that reality harbors: In the Ukrainian competition entry “Reflection” by Valentyn Vasyanovych, who played during the escalation of the conflict with Russia in 2014, the Russian military tortured the Ukrainian prisoners; in Natasha Merkulova and Aleksey Chupov’s film “Captain Volkonogov Escaped”, set in the early Soviet Union, the Russians torture each other. These are drastic images that otherwise do not appear in such an accumulation and rain down on the audience – until at some point it seems advisable to realize that you are only seeing buckets of fake blood here. Otherwise the pictures are almost unbearable.
Does the cinema try to set any processing processes in motion? With Ana Lily Amirpour’s “Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon” you really don’t know which ones it should be. It shows a Korean girl who has been imprisoned in a straitjacket in an asylum near New Orleans since childhood and who uses psychic powers on a full moon night to finally run away – but it is unclear why she hasn’t done that long ago. She runs into a stripper (Kate Hudson) who immediately decides to make money from Mona Lisa’s skills. The film is too loud, poorly played, and the script either has as many holes in it as Swiss cheese or the New Orleans police are too stupid to call.
“L’évènement” is based on Annie Ernaux’s book, a story about abortion
There is Edgar Wright’s horror film “Last Night in Soho”, which was shown out of competition, of a different caliber – stylish in any case. His heroine Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie) loves the clothes and the music of the 1960s so much that when she finally comes to a fashion school in London, she even begins to dream the era, but so intensely that she wakes up with hickey. Soon Sandie, the young woman who appears to Eloise in her dreams, has to bury her future plans, she does not become a star in a Soho club, she becomes a hooker, the supposed manager turns out to be a pimp, and Eloise becomes in the presence of undead suitors hunted. Perhaps behind this are completely real fears of the loss of women’s rights or female revenge, of totalitarianism and war. Edgar Wright, for example, seems to process his horror of “Me Too” here – but female serial killers are actually quite rare.
Audrey Diwan adapted the book “The Event” by Annie Ernaux for “L’évènement” in a competition: Anne (Anamaria Vartolomei) can only go to university because her parents are hard at work in their small bar in the provinces. You can see her with her friends in the dormitory, in extreme close-ups, and at first she is quite carefree, although she did not get her days. Soon she will know that she is pregnant and that she will then be able to forget about her exam. It is not immediately obvious what time that takes place, the girls could just as easily be into vintage clothes until Anne gets a few old franc notes from her mother. It’s 1963 and Anne can’t find anyone to help her or even talk to her openly. Her doctor anxiously turns away, her friend says: “Shut up, otherwise we will all go to jail.” It’s 1963, abortion is a punishable offense, and week after week Anne is cornered more by loneliness and the passage of time before she tackles herself with a knitting needle.
The fear at issue here rises like a zombie from the grave: Marine Le Pen, for example, chairwoman of the Rassemblement National, actually wants to make abortions more difficult in France, like many right-wing parties in Europe, you don’t even have to put the bans in the USA strive. When Le Pen made a move a few years ago, the then health minister said it was a return to the knitting needles that Le Pen was planning. Especially in such a bloody competition as this year, “The Event” is something special. Why is every strange brutality in the cinema taken for granted, but abortions not? With Audrey Diwan you actually see an unusually large amount of it, but she uses the blood sparingly. This is the stuff nightmares are made of – a bloody hook and the desperation in Anne’s eyes.