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AMERICAN
CINEMA PAPERS
2008
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VENICE 2008 – THE 65 th MOSTRA DEL CINEMA A PRIDE OF
LIONS by Harlan Kennedy Gilded as Charged Pride comes before a fall and so it is each year in Glorious In media vita in bosca insula Io mi trovo, sul
lido antico, E molta pellicula vedere Vivo, respiro, cantando.** (In the middle of life I find
myself on a dark island, on an ancient beach, and I live and breathe and sing
there while watching many films) Another famous Italian, Marco Polo, was nicknamed ‘Marco Millions’ in
a play of that title by Eugene O’Neill. In 2008 we must confer this moniker
on festival director Marco Mueller. He suddenly has millions to play with –
millions of Euros – as the Adriatic city determines to build a proper lion
house, one to out-roar A chorus of guests and journalists stood by, amid trees which had once
looked down on the festival’s open-air café and restaurant area (and before
that on druids and wood nymphs), as Biennale president Paolo Baratta, with Mueller at his side, laid the foundation
stone for a new Palazzo del Cinema planned for 2011. These Italians mean business. They are planning a bigger, better,
bolder festival. We witnesses to the groundbreaking already knew their
forward-gazing dream since we had passed, that morning, the old but still
active Palazzo del Cinema. Its display frontage this year was a giant white
screen from which – courtesy of maestro Ferretti –
a row of three lions was seen bursting forth, a 3D ensemble of heads, paws
and torsos, a sequence of beasts growing in size even while frozen in the act
of tearing open the white cloth. As Dante wrote: In media piazza popoloso Tre leoni, gli occhi
folgorenti, Laceranti lo velo bianco, Io stupefacto
miro**
(In the middle of the crowded piazza three lions, their eyes flashing,
tear the white sail, as I look on in wonder and stupefaction) **All quotes from Dante are
in medieval cod Italian The Mint with the Hole Let us hope that the paymasters of Signor M. Millions, formerly
Mueller, really do follow through. Italian budgets sometimes prove to have
holes in them, as those know who have seen the ghost-builds of southern What more can Marco Millions do, though, than he does? He parades the
stars under a starry sky. On opening
night this year we had George Clooney and Brad Pitt, smiling for crowds
rendered nearly sightless, if not speechless (“George!”, “Brad!”), by the
dazzle of Hollywood glamour. The two men starred in the smash-hit gala movie,
the Coen brothers’ BURN AFTER A goddess at Pizazz di San Marco What more can Marco Millions do than march out each summer on the
world’s cinematic trade road, its new silk route, and collect the best that
money can buy? His lone competitor is the three-year-old But hasn’t VEGAS: BASED ON A TRUE STORY. Director Amir Naderi helped to jumpstart the New Iranian Cinema with
THE RUNNER before relocating to the BIRDWATCHERS: THE Filmwatchers: the Land of Mad Men (and Women) We come, we see, we hope to be conquered. We are adventurers moving in
a foreign land, uncertain who will capture whom, whose vision will compel,
ambush or persuade. Often mere moments prevail like the flash of the tiger’s
eye or the scream of the macaw. It is the face of Dominique Blanc, blanched and hood-eyed like Bette
Davis or Carolyn Jones, staring at her doppelganger’s face on a passing train
in L’AUTRE, a French film about midlife paranoid schizophrenia. (Comes to us
all). It is the avant-garde painter killing himself – and a few of us with
shocked laughter – as he drives a truckful of paint
into a wall in Takeshi Kitano’s ACHILLES AND THE TORTOISE, all about the
kamikaze spirit in modern art. It is, in But wait. Look towards the ultimate. Japanimation
is surely – now and still – the most exotic lifeform
on the movie planet. Creators such as Hayao
Miyazaki and Mamoru Oshii, both in PONYO ON THE CLIFF BY THE SEA is Only Then for boy and mum it is off down the crazily corkscrewing cliff
road – a character in its own right, subject to comical recurrings
– to the old people’s home where mum works. This is soon engulfed by the
movie’s piece de resistance, a tsunami which submerges everything and everyone
before receding to leave them renewed and re-fortified. Somewhere in the
billows of the plot, Ponyo becomes Sosuke’s chum and co-lead, her mad-guppy phiz accessorised by stick limbs. Not for her the Lolita
curves of Disney’s little mermaid. She remains a demented sprog,
a little frightening along with the lovability. Deservedly, she and her film have been a smash in To call Mamoru Oshii’s THE SKY CRAWLERS
‘sinister’ would be correct but redundant. Isn’t all Japanimation
a little sinister, even the kids’ stuff? Isn’t that its spell? The flatly
painted – yet never flatly characterised – humans are like ghost-presences,
pale and incandescent of eye, in aquatint landscapes rich with subtle detail.
The reassurances of contour, the comfort-blanket swells and creases of
digital 3D, are not there. Instead we are in a haunted yesterday of art and
technology, where the toys come to life in the cinemagoing
darkness with help from good magicians. The feeling is replicated – fable matching form – by the ghostly
twists and torques in Oshii’s story, derived from a
graphic novel by Hiroshi Mori. A handful of teenagers runs
a fighter air base deep in the English countryside. (Pubs, English-language
signs, rolling moorlands). That the teens are
Japanese makes this a bit surreal. In fact it makes us suspect that Warners, who co-produced, will rename them and redub them for western release. Expect ‘Chuck’ and ‘Wendy’ for
‘Yuichi’ and ‘Suito.’ The youngsters go up in the sky for daily dogfights with unnamed
enemies, in dashingly animated action scenes. Down on the ground all is
different. We are in a precocious film noir. The characters are mired in a
mysterious angst. They smoke; the boys visit brothels. Death wish and talk of
suicide are in the air. These kids, we learn, are ‘Kildren’,
genetic engineering products who cannot grow up and can only die by violence.
Think of child soldiers – those doomed tots of Africa and other geopolitical
cauldrons – and realise that this eerie, comfortless film is real, in its
way, not surreal, and very much for today. The Bigelow Red One Who said Hollywood was dead? Several people said it at Venice. They
said, for instance, and especially, that American studio cinema couldn’t recover
from the writers’ strike or not in time to deliver to the Lido. Then along came Kathryn Bigelow’s THE HURT LOCKER, which shot to the
top of the daily festival mag’s critics poll, and
Darren Aronofsky’s THE WRESTLER, which shot Mickey Rourke out of a cannon – the canon of his distant stardom
– and into a comeback. Rourke moseys majestically
through this patchy fight saga, a Rocky retread in the wrestling ring,
scripted by Robert Siegel. Rourke turns to
histrionic gold everything that with another mummer might be dead lead. He
looks a mess but in this movie is meant to. The hair is long blond
snake-locks. The face seems to have emerged from 12 punishing rounds with a
plastic surgeon. The lips look as if they have been snorting collagen and
forgotten to say “when.” But what heft in the presence! What fire in the
acting! As he did as long ago as BODY HEAT, Rourke
can crush with a whisper and kill with an utterance. THE WRESTLER is no
Golden Lion winner, we all thought, but it might be in for Best Actor. THE HURT LOCKER proves what we have long suspected of Kathryn Bigelow.
She is the transgender reincarnation of Sam Fuller. This impudent action
movie from the woman who gave us BLUE STEEL, POINT BREAK and STRANGE DAYS
begins with three suspense scenes in a row, each a variant on the theme of
bomb defusal. Soldiers in a US army unit counting
down its days in Iraq try to stay in one piece, in every grim sense of that
phrase. Bigelow, directing a script by war reporter Mark Boal,
pulls a couple of swift shocks by killing, after five minutes of screen time
each, two of her name stars. This leaves space and time for Jeremy Renner,
who looks like a young Rod Steiger, to build his
portrait of the protagonist-by-default. Renner’s Sergeant James is gung-ho,
going on psychotic. His love of danger – risking his comrades’ lives as well
as his own in pursuit of devil-may-care bomb disarmings – is meat, drink and
adrenalin. He cannot imagine life without life-risking hazard, as a brief
homecoming sequence proves. He is soon back in the
theatre of action, strutting down another mean street towards a meaner IED.
The nailbiting tension of the suspense scenes is
matched, for power, by the shrapnel intensity of the punishment meted out
when prevention fails. You Never Can Tell Three fine films that had repeat showings on the fringe enriched the
festival in final days. Agnes Varda’s LES PLAGES
D’AGNES is an autobiographical treat from the New Wave veteran, full of
visual invention – starting with the mirrors on a beach that make antic,
animated portraits of Varda and her gathered
friends – and eloquent with affection for acting pals seen in precious
archive footage. (Did Gerard Depardieu really once look that young?) Another French film, Sylvie Berheyde’s STELLA, brings a Colette-worthy finesse to its
growing-up tale of a pre-teen girl trying to improve a heart and mind
battered by roughhouse upbringing. From the Czech Republic came Bohdan Slama’s A COUNTRY
TEACHER, in which a fresh-faced teacher comes to a village with the destiny,
if not the intention, of emancipating it from bigotry. He is gay. People soon
know it who would rather not. Attitudes are ready
for threshing as summer turns to autumn. Modest but memorable. It shows you never can tell. Early omen-readers had said this would be
a lousy festival. We all thought it would be while we were suffering
through Barbet Schroeder’s INJU, a certifiable Franco-Japanese murder
thriller, and Yu Lik-Wei’s PLASTIC CITY, an even
more daft Sino-Brazilian crime and drugs romp. In Venice’s first days the
compass of world cinema seemed to wobbling about like a seasick sailor, with
hemisphere-hopping directors travelling to make films on the far sides of
their known worlds. Only later, with BIRDWATCHERS and VEGAS, was it proved that directors
could cross oceans and bring fresh, revealing visions. A film festival itself
celebrates the coming together of different cultures. So – widening that
theme further – does the history of Italy. In that giant marquee plastered
with posters that hailed the coming 150th anniversary of Italian unification, that stone was laid for a new palace of
cinema. More movie seats, more Mostra guests, more
world attention zoning in on an Adriatic landspit.
Can Venice take it? Can it take the numbers and the razzmatazz? I hope so. But I hope it can also keep that homely feel, the sense of
a little hamlet lapped by big waters, where fate and chance bring together a
few hundred people with a common passion. When Marshall McLuhan
invented the phrase “global village” he was surely thinking of the Lido in
festival time. A loaf of bruschetta, a jug of
Chianti and thou – world cinema – beside me. ‘Twere Paradise enow. Let’s hope
it will still be Paradise in 2011. By the way, THE WRESTLER won the Golden Lion. Like I said, you never
can tell. COURTESY T.P. MOVIE NEWS. WITH THANKS TO THE
AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE FOR THEIR CONTINUING INTEREST IN WORLD CINEMA. ©HARLAN
KENNEDY. All rights reserved |
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