Continued: 67th Venice Film Festival
It has been another exciting couple of days on the Lido here in Venice, and I’ve seen six more films in competition, as well as yet another out of competition blockbuster from China. Reign of Assassins is an action-filled fantasy film, set in ancient China and co-directed by the legendary John Woo. Woo was honoured at the screening, receiving a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievment – handed to him by Quentin Tarantino and his good friend, and fellow director, Tsui Hark (Seven Swords). Industry movers and shakers were in attendance to watch the director of Face/Off and Hard Boiled, with the likes of Harvey Weinstein adding to the applause during the many standing ovations.
Reign of Assassins is not vintage Woo, however. It is uneven and sometimes feels a little cheap. But it is an outlandish fantasy, with wizzards and bending swords, and a plot with more twists and turns than the queue up to the Sala Grande! It starts slowly, but the final third is solidly entertaining. Worth seeing for fans of Hero or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, with its wire fu stunts and intricately choreographed set-pieces.
I was also able to see two of the Italian “in competition” offerings, in the form of La passione and La pecora nera. Both were massive sell-outs on their opening nights, with locals snapping up tickets before they were made available to press, and it was touch-and-go seeing either of them as a result. But I’m glad I did. Both were very funny and inventive films, though it is unlikely either will see much foreign distribution due to the high number of Italian in-jokes and culturally specific references. I laughed, but the Italian’s in the audience were in pain-inducing hysterics for much of both. Especially during La passione.
La passione is the story of a film-maker who is struggling to get a movie off the ground since his last five years ago. He is suffering from a lack of creative ideas, and his troubles are compounded when his holiday flat in Tuscany suffers a burst water pipe, destroying a historic fresco in an adjacent church. The authorities hold Gianni responsible and coerce him into repaying his debt to society by directing the local amateur production of the Passion of Christ. Really funny, although I’m sure I missed more of the jokes than I got.
La pecora nera is almost equally good. Directed by and starring Ascanio Celestini, and adapted from his own novel, the film concerns Nicolas: a man who has spent his whole life around a mental hospital. A comedy with dark edges and a winning central performance that looks at the border between sanity and madness – asking us whether the only real difference is the label. Indeed, in La pecora nera, those taken for sane are full of their own excentricities and quirks which Celestini shows up with great wit.
Meanwhile, Francois Ozon debuted his latest film today, Potiche, which stars established French stars Catherine Deneurve and Gerard Depardieu. A playfully kitsch social satire set in 1970s France, Potiche takes a knowing look at gender roles, social class and politics, all in a quirky, colourful and irreverant fashion. Very enthusiastically received at the screening I attended, I will be shocked if this one doesn’t wind up playing Picturehouses when it secures UK distribution. With cinematic allusions to Jean-Luc Godard’s Tout Va Bien (specifically as a boss is taken hostage in his office by his striking workforce), it is a film with a lot to say and which leaves you with just as much to think about. I’m not sure whether I enjoyed it yet, but I am appreciating it more as I think about it.
Yesterday threw up a delightful little surprise package, in the form of the Russian Ovsyanki (Silent Souls). This film is basically an odd little road trip about cultural identity, as a couple of men – from a now forgotten Finnish tribe called the Merya – go about a series of elaborate and strange mourning rituals after the wife of one of the duo passes away. The film is mysterious and facinating, beautifully shot on digital cameras and with some bravura camera movements employed by its director, Aleksei Fedorchenko – the memorable involving a slow 180 degree pan inside a moving car. Slow, patient and haunting, Silent Souls is refreshingly different from anything else I’ve seen so far, and manages to say more in its slender 75 minute running time, than many films say in three hours. Yet it did so with patience and poise, with many long single-takes lastng upwards of five minutes and featuring little or no dialogue.
Finally, I have seen two competing American films. Less than an hour ago I watched a sort of lo-fi Western, directed by Kelly Reichardt (Wendy and Lucy), called Meek’s Cutoff. The film follows a group of settlers moving west across the Oregon Trail in 1845, led by the unreliable and potentially dangerous Stephen Meek. Soon they capture an Indian, dividing the small and Puritanical party. Do they kill him? Will he be their undoing? I am not yet sure whether it is a subtle and well-observed portrait of human behaviour, or a tedious bore. What I can say for sure is that Michelle Williams, who is working with the director for a second time, is absolutely, show-stealingly brilliant in her role as one of the travellers. It also features Paul Dano, Shirley Henderson and Zoe Kazan, all of whom perform well. Certainly it is a slow and thoughtful film, and a seemingly realistic depiction of the hardship faced by the those early settlers – with their lack of basic rescources and the back-breaking effort it required to do even simple things.
That brings me to the second American film I mentioned, as yesterday morning provided the chance to see Sofia Coppola’s latest film Somewhere. Reminiscent of Lost in Translation, Somewhere stars Stephen Dorff as an isolated and disconnected actor living in LA. His lifestyle is fast-living, but ultimately unfulfilling, and when his 11-year-old daughter (Elle Fanning) shows up at his hotel, he comes to understand how incompetent he is at life in general. Visually beautiful, with the long and slow takes that have become her trademark, the film is definitely well worth watching. How much you like it, however, may be similar to how much you enjoyed Lost in Translation. It certainly won’t win any new fans, with the same “nothing happens” narrative and dead-pan sense of humour. I dug it, but it is perhaps not for everyone. The film is at its best when Coppola depicts press conferences and award ceremonies, absolutely nailing the inherent absurdity in, and the vacuous nature of, interactions with the media. At the real thing, the post-film press junket here in Venice, Coppola gave short, snappy answers. She is clearly someone who lets her films do the talking. And when they talk like this, who can blame her?
Check back in a couple of days for more from Venice, by the I expect to have seen many more films, including: John Turturo’s Passione (not to be confused with La passione!), Vincent Gallo’s Promises Written in Water and Martin Scorsese’s A Letter to Elia.
