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AMERICAN
CINEMA PAPERS
1984
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VENICE FILM FESTIVAL – 1984 THE RENAISSANCE RULED O.K. by Harlan Kennedy It's a topsy-turvy
film festival where the members of the international jury outshine in
celebrity the makers of the films on view. Good Heavens, can Venice really
have assembled in one festival Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, Gunther Grass,
Isaac Bashevis Singer, Yevgeny
Yevtushenko, Erica Jong,
Joris Ivens and Michelangelo Antonioni – all sitting in
judgment on a group of movies that one sometimes felt would not have taxed
the judgmental powers of a drunk picked at random off the Piazza San Marco?
We exaggerate, of course. But not that much. As a wag said, why
didn't they let us sit and watch the jury each evening instead of the films?
The Venice Fest is a great and
glorious event, but signori e signore, just what did happen to the
selecting of the movies this year? It was Gian Luigi Rondi's
second
year as festival director and let's begin by asking some full-frontal
questions about policy. Waxing mystical about the "spirit" of the
festival, a fine-sounding criterion that covers a multitude of ambiguities, Rondi stuffed the Main Competition with Italian (six) and
French (five) movies. The result was that the festival tended to resemble a
mutual back-patting jamboree for two near-neighbour
countries, who could extend giant arms across the Swiss Alps and give each
other a series of congratulatory clouts. Meanwhile there was
room for only one American film and one British film in competition. And lest
we're accused of being Anglo-Saxon-chauvinistic, there was scarcely a damn
thing also from Eastern Europe; though the American film was Andrei Konchalovsky's Maria's Lovers, in which Nastassja Kinski plays musical
trousseaus with an all-star series of suitors (Robert Mitchum,
John Savage, Keith Carradine) and a Russian
director is let loose on Midwest American mores to reveal his complete lack
of sympathy or insight into them. Hugh Hudson's Greystoke,
the British entry, stood head, shoulders and Tarzan locks
above this offering. But the jury, presumably feeling that they in turn stood
head, shoulders and intellect above it, awarded zero to Hudson's jungle epic cum social
parable. A pity. What prize could possibly be more appropriate to a Tarzan film
than a Golden Lion? Now, lest you are
already saying to yourself "Well, this is obviously a nix film fest, I
might as well stop reading and go and feed the cat or polish the china",
arrest yourself instantly in your tracks. There were outstanding pics as
well as stretcher-cases, and even in one of its more embattled years Venice
is still a vital clearing-house for major movies and a vital late-year
counterweight to Cannes and Berlin. The dottiness of fest chief
Rondi's Franco-Italian push, furthermore, was
highlighted by the films that actually won the prizes. The Golden Lion
trapped Poland's Krzystof Zanussi
in a warm and breathy embrace for his Rok
Spokojnego Slonca, a title I want you to go away and learn for homework and
then come back telling me it means (as it does) Year of the Quiet Sun. We'll
be hearing more about this subtle meditation on new worlds and new lives,
partly set in America, when it comes to London. Here we will content
ourselves with jumping three feet in the air in praise of Maja Komorowska's performance – this
ravaged Polish beauty has been in several Zanussi
films but has never twanged her violin nerve-ends to better effect – and in
praise of Zanussi's flair for laying lives out
pinned and fat like butterflies yet still allowing his characters' souls room
for movement. Micheline Lanctot's Canadian Sonatine
copped the Silver Lion for its tangy sentimental
comedy about two girl adolescents (Pascale Bussieres and Marcia Pilote) on the
lookout for Life and Romance. And Otar Ioseliani's captivating Les
Favoris de
la Lune and Pupi Avati's Noi Tre (We Three) won respectively a
Special Jury Prize and a Technical Merit award. In short, none of the Franco-Italian old guard trotted out by Rondi this year as if he were mobilising
his crack troops – Rosnais,
Rouch, Rohmer, Rivette,
Rosi (what is this, a conspiracy of the Rs?) – won anything;
except a Best Actress trophy for the late Pascale Ogier, perky giraffe-faced
heroine of Eric Rohmer's Les Nuits de la Pleine Lune. And she won it, I suspect,
because Eric gave her a huge bouquet of lines to speak, some of them witty,
which she cast before us with a nasal nonchalance blissfully welcome after
all the post-dubbed sweat and boom of the Italian pics and the "Ah Mon Dieu, que ćest impenetrable, la
vie!" gravity of most of the French ones. Resnais's L'Amour A Mort and Rivette's L'Amour Par Terre – a pair of titles designed to confuse the clearest of brains – drank
deep of this Gallic gallimaufry. Resnais's film
starts by asking "Can there be life (in this world) after death?"
as his Lazarus hero Pierre Arditi
springs back to life after being pronounced dead
by a doctor. And then it goes on to ask "Can there be love after
death?" as M Arditi
dies again (and finally) and his stricken
beloved, Sabine Azéma, insists
that her love is inviolate and continuing despite his corporeal absence. Fanny Ardant and André Dussolier rally round as a
pair of advice-offering married pastors (to each other) and Resnais and scriptwriter Jean Gruault
(of Mon Orcle d'Amerique) punctuate the film with sequences of a black screen flecked
by flurries of snow. Hăns Werner Henze's music squeaks and tingles
eloquently like a stricken mechanical mouse, and there are wondrous moments
of Clouzot-like Gothic suspense with the dead
returning and the living relapsing as Nature's absolutes are turned upside
down. But it's a chamber film to the point of claustrophobia; and its
fundamentalist questions end by chasing their own tails up a grim Cartesian
cul-de-sac. Jacques Rivette's L'Amour Par Terre is more
playful but no more satisfying. Jane Birkin, Geraldine Chaplin, André Dussolier (again) and others
inhabit a madcap chateau where they're rehearsing for an amateur theatricals
weekend. Ghosts are sighted, partners are swapped, and references to Alice
In Wonderland are delivered in lorry-loads by Rivette's
archly frolicsome script. This kind of open-plan movie – where anything goes
and a glimpse of narrative orthodoxy is looked on as something shocking –
needs far more energy and delirium than Monsieur R and his thespians can
muster here. Rohmer's Les Nuits de la Pleine Lune has the splendid and
aforementioned Mlle Ogier
carrying all before her in another of the
Frenchman's series of "comédies
et proverbes". This one's about a
kooky Parisienne (Ogier) who can't
choose between the steady lover she already has and the life of cheerful
promiscuity she wants. It's the age-old toss-up, in short, between the Steady
State and the Big Bang. All cheerful carousel stuff, and Rohmer's dialogue
goes with a swing. But wasn't there a bit more poetry and substance – and no
less comedy – in Eric's chefs-d'oevres of
old like My Night With Maud and Claire's Knee? Jean Rouch's entirely lunatic Dionysus,
which shows an attempt to spread revivifying Bacchic frenzy through the French car industry (sic)
and to whop European cultural traditionalism over the head with a bit of
Third World folk culture, we will pass over with embarrassed haste. It's like
a 60s hippy charging round the icon-scape of 80s
Capitalism with a Super-8 camera and hoping meaning will accrue from the whir
of disconnected imagery. Italy's rock bottom contributions to the Competition were Marco Ferreri's Il Futuro
E
Donna (The Future Is Woman), a louchely silly eternal-triangle pic starring Hanna Schygulla and Ornella
Muti, and Pasquale Squittieri's turgid and absurd Claretta, which
turns Mussolini and his mistress into misunderstood folk heroes. Claudia Cardinale plays I1
Duce's beloved, Clara
Petacci, in a series of knock-out outfits (will Fascist Chic be next, year's
style?), but the sprawling structure and nonsensical revisionism ensure that
this is one Claudia that doesn't have a silver lining. Francesco Rosi's Carmen is a brave bash at plonking Bizet's opera down
amid real locations – Andalusia in Spain – and has Placido Domingo and Julia Migenes Johnson shrieking
melodiously away as Don Jose and the gypsy. But the best Italian film in the
Competition was another bow to a great composer, Pupi Avati's summery study of the young
Mozart, Noi Tre (We Three). Here is Wolfgang Amadeus (Christopher Davidson),
aged 14, spending his last summer of freedom on
Count Pallavicini's estate – palling up with the
Count's son and falling in love with a neighbouring
girl – before he takes the music exam which will rocket-fire him into the
grim galaxy of Greatness. Dappled, butterfly photography, a cleverly
freewheeling structure, and excellent performances. If you want my personal Golden Lion nomination, though – and I know
you're all clamouring for it – I award the hairy
beast to Otar Ioseliani's
splendid Les Favoris de la Lune (Children of the Moon). This
Russian-Georgian director who seems to have been given the freedom of France
(he made the much laurelled Pastorale) has
made a Paris-set comedy of criminal and low-life misunderstandings that's
like The Lavender Hill Mob remade by Buńuel. A crazy-kaleidoscopic narrative and a cast of catch-them-if-you-can
characters – gangsters, molls, lawyers, policemen – whir through a tale of
stolen paintings, sex, Sčvres
china and scatty
subterfuge. The theme is theft (moral and emotional as well as burglarious),
but it's the variations that are magical and the comic confidence with which
they're played. Quick – is some British distributor listening? – grab it now,
if you haven't already done so. Venice may have had its funereal festival days this year, when one
felt the urge to wear sackcloth and ashes and tear out one's hair, but this pic made up for a lot;
and so did Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's Kaos (Chaos). Since Paolo and Vittorio were on the
jury, this 3-hour movie was shown out of Competition. Otherwise it would
surely have been a top contender for the golden jungle cat. In sun-scorched Sicily four Pirandello tales and an
epilogue unfurl. All home in on the lunatic fringe of human passions or
obsessions, from werewolfery to possessiveness to
the insatiate pangs of bereavement, and all charge through yarns carved with
thrilling immediacy towards denouements richly ambiguous. Most touching of
all is the "Epilogue", where we meet the aging Pirandello himself (Ornera
Antonutti) chugging home to Sicily after his mother's death and having an
imaginary chat with her at the hearthside – during which he and we flashback
to the enchanted white pumice isle where he disported as a child. Chaos seeks
the thread of love and identity we must all carry Theseus-like
with us – or try to – through the fierce and monster-trodden labyrinth of
human life and its vicissitudes. There were times when we sure could have done with such a thread at
Venice. The combined endeavours of Theseus, Sherlock Holmes and the team who
deciphered Linear B could not have sufficed to unravel the working of
bureaucratic policy in the festival this year. Why was there such a big
police and security presence outside the Festival Palazzo each day? Was it to
stop people breaking in or to stop them breaking out? At Cannes all this
"Ils ne passeront pas"
hoop-la is just about understandable, since there are usually about 3,000
journalists and other festival guests trying to get into every 1,000-seater
showing. But at Venice – unless, as I suggest, the precautions are Iron
Curtain-like to keep people in – few of the performances in the big auditoria were oversubscribed. Punctuality has become another sacred cow at Venice during the last
two years. By all means take action to discourage the terrible discomfort to
film-watchers to latecomers who stumble past you in the dark spilling
Coca-Cola and takeaway spaghetti into your lap and eclipsing your view of Claudia Cardinale or Laura Antonelli. But a festival without some flexibility
of viewing manners defeats the purpose that a festival is there for: as a
giant trade fair for international cinema where the maximum amount of seeing
and sampling is desirable in the time limit allowed. To remove the privilege
of hotfooting from a film which after five minutes you realize is a turkey
and then sneaking a little late into a film you soon realize is a masterpiece
(and whose missing minutes you can probably catch up later in the fest anyway) is
to hamstring the festivalgoer's freedom. What makes this "Please do not be late, signori'' policy even more unworkable is the proliferating
richness of Venice's different sections, which could keep you busy literally
all day. As well as the Competition, there is now a Video Event, a TV section,
a Venezia Notte programme (midnight
razzamatazz like Indiana Jones and Streets of Fire), a
new Cannes-imitating "Critics Week" and other clusters of movies
grouped under such vague banner-headings as "Venezia Gente" and "Venezia De Sica" (as in the famous Italian proverb, "Sica and you shall
find.") You can always be surprised, pleasantly or unpleasantly, by films
that pop up from unlikely authors or sources. Who would suppose that Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Russia's
darling liberal poet of yesteryear, would reappear in 1984 carrying two hours
worth of celluloid called Detskij Sad (Garden
of Childhood)? Pretty whimsical stuff, mind you – full of dogs and
goldfish and peasants – but a lot better than some of the pics on view.
Like that strangely fathered movie Der
Spiegel, Erden
Kiral's German-produced Turkish tragedy of guilt and revenge wherein the
director of A Season In Hakkari wins the
Golden Snail prize for slowness and minimalism beyond the call. Among the other Venice odds and ends that leap up and grab you by
their virtues or vices are Yugoslavia's O Pokojniku
Sve Najlepse (Speak
Well of the Dead), a harshly hectoring World War 2 drama directed
by Predrag Antonijevic as
if he had punched sprocket holes in a hairshirt and
run it through the projector; Gavin Ledda's completely crackers Ybris from
Italy, a harshly lecturing peasant allegory from the writer of Padre Padrone in which Leonardo Da Vinci makes a guest
appearance (yes, I thought he was dead too); Dagmar Hirtz's Unerreichbare Näve (Unbreakable Affinity) from West Germany, a
love-and-passion melodrama acted with oomph by Kathrin Ackermann and Klaus
Grünberg; and La Neve
Nel Bicchiere
(A Cup of Snow) by Florestano Vancini, all about
Italian social struggles in the 19-teen and resembling Bertolucci's
1900 as if reworked by Bert O'Lucci. And of course there was Edgar Reitz's 15˝-hour epic of German folk
history Heimat (Homeland). This movie was intended for TV serialisation, so you are not required to watch it all at
one sitting. Nor do I intend to write about it all in one paragraph;
especially since I haven't seen it and the BBC have bought it for
transmission and there will also be a complete showing at this year's London Film
Festival in November. Show! Villages! War! Emotion! Love! Hate! Sausages!
Yes, all human life is there, and a lot more. Or so I'm told. And so it was and will continue to be at Venice, despite the oddball
policies and attacks of galloping redtape-itis. Signori e signore, forget about Mussolini who founded the Venice Film Festival and made
the trains run on time (but note he never confused the two matters and tried
to make the festival run on time). Cast your sights much further back,
to the chaotic luxuriance and fecundity of an earlier Venice and Italy – when the Renaissance ruled OK and
talent and genius were not shackled by schedules or corralled by cordons. No
one said, "If you're two minutes late for the new Titian, you can't see
it" or "If you haven't got a blue Press card, you can't see the new
Giorgione". Art must be free, and so must be those humble worshippers at art's
shrine who call themselves critics and journalists. Evviva l'arte! Evviva Venezia! Evviva la Mostra! And evviva lo prossimo anno! COURTESY T.P. MOVIE NEWS. WITH THANKS TO THE
AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE FOR THEIR CONTINUING INTEREST IN WORLD CINEMA. THIS ARTICLE APPEARED
IN FILMS MAGAZINE, LONDON, IN THE NOVEMBER
1984 ISSUE. ©HARLAN
KENNEDY. All rights reserved. |
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