Pasolini By then, I’d already seen a healthy chunk of the film program at this year’s edition, dutifully shuttling among the temple-like monumental theaters at the festival’s heart. And a clear standout, though not universally acclaimed, was Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini, a biographical sketch that saw the self-exiled New York filmmaker continuing to lay his hands on white-hot material in European politics and culture. Making its world premiere a few months after Ferrara’s Welcome to New York in Cannes, this exquisitely tuned portrait looks at the pioneering gay Marxist filmmaker-poet-theorist through his last days on Earth in November 1975, all interspersed with fanciful/macabre scenes from his unmade film Porno-Teo-Kolossal. Willem Dafoe embodies the 53-year-old Pasolini with a sensual cool and watchful intelligence, and the script by Maurizio Braucci (Gomorrah) luxuriates in the loving environment of his family and friends and in the outspoken intellectual’s choice quotations (starting with a gauntlet-throwing television interview). Pasolini’s insights at this point in his career have an apocalyptic ring, and that suits Ferrara well, in elegiac mode here, aided by supple, melancholically beautiful cinematography by Stefano Falivene, especially in the portrayal of the artist’s final, violent night. The act of Pasolini’s murder is rendered in full, twinned indelibly with acts of desire, and as for Ferrara’s opinion of who the guilty parties might be, the prominent placement of EUR, Rome’s Fascist architectural showcase, in montages is hard to ignore.
Heaven Knows What A menace of a different sort shadows the aimless heroin addicts of Heaven Knows What (which, unlike Pasolini, quickly acquired U.S. distribution, by Weinstein’s RADiUS shingle). Panic in Needle Park—the 1971 Al Pacino addiction romance set in New York’s Upper West Side—was the touchstone for early takes on the film, which centers on Harley (Arielle Holmes), trapped in cruel love with the vicious Ilya (Caleb Landry Jones). But this is something else again, the spirited product of wonderfully dissonant collaboration: the pointlessly cutesy title may show the hand of directors Josh and Benny Safdie (cf. Go Get Some Rosemary aka Daddy Longlegs), but they’ve chosen some vocal partners who keep the film fired up. Holmes is the most apparent, author of her own memoir of addiction and homelessness, Mad Love in New York City, and a wild-haired natural performer and risk-taker who holds her own under a potentially exploitative premise. But just as crucial is co-screenwriter-editor Ronald Bronstein, himself the director of the under-sung Frownland (07), and here confirming himself as a vital creative force in the Safdies’ varying career; the star of Daddy Longlegs infuses Heaven Knows What with jagged rhythms that play against the usual cinematic beats of a self-destructive life on the streets. DP Sean Price Williams mans the eagle-eyed camera that gives the Safdies’ rambles their stolen look, while the whole movie’s howl is unified by gloriously excessive, unpredictably deployed blasts of analog electronic arrangements by Isao Tomita. Its appeal came as a surprise to me, no fan of their loaded documentary outing about a fallen basketball star, Lenny Cooke.
In the Basement I did know fairly well what to expect with In the Basement, Ulrich Seidl’s documentary about Austrians and their subterranean pursuits, and I wasn’t disappointed. It’s almost a surprise that Seidl hadn’t forayed downstairs already, having portrayed other depths of experience from pornography (Import/Export) to religious martyrdom (Paradise: Faith) to near-zoophilia (Animal Love) to sheer shut-in nuttiness (Loss Is to Be Expected). His selection of regular folk—presented less as oddities to gawk at than as the invisible norm, perhaps—include an opera enthusiast with an underground gun range, a bunch of drinking buddies who might politely be called Hitler nostalgists, and a female-dom S/M couple whose scrotally challenging practices reliably elicited nervous chuckles. As often with Seidl, there’s something satisfying about the plainspoken mystery of human desires, but another result of the film is its underlining of the tension between the varying fidelity to the personalities and psychologies of his subjects, and the stirrings of the director’s own creative urges—which, for example, lead him to partly fabricate episodes about a woman who looks after lifelike baby dolls kept in boxes in a storage room. The grounds for pause isn’t deception but rather whether his aesthetic decisions tend to flatten out or obscure those of his subjects.
Goodnight Mommy The freaky goings-on in Goodnight Mommy might well deserve their own episode in Seidl’s film, but they’re decidedly not limited to the basement. It’s a piece of stringently nasty Gothic home horror from Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz, the latter a critic co-directing her first feature but already a veteran collaborator with Seidl, her husband. In a modernist house in the country, two blond pre-teen boys begin to suspect that their mother—her face obscured with bandages after an accident, and her mood distinctly soured—may not be who she appears to be. The German title, Ich Seh Ich Seh, suggests the kid’s game “I Spy,” and part of the fun is watching the growing boldness on both sides as parent-child relations cruelly degenerate and the mystery of the situation ripens and rots. The confinement drama, though perhaps predictable to attentive horror veterans, pays off with some prime living-room Grand Guignol, and the deceptively lucid imagery is, as the credits proudly proclaim, “filmed in glorious 35mm.”
The Look of Silence The real-life horrors of Indonesian genocide received another look by Joshua Oppenheimer in his follow-up to The Act of Killing. The Look of Silence acts in many ways as a concerted complement to its mind-bending predecessor but with its own meaningful shock treatment: our guide this time is an Indonesian, Adi, whose older brother was murdered during the Sixties genocide; and the documentary structure is somewhat more serial and more static in its interviews, as Adi confronts killers in often dangerous visits. It’s a stomach-churning watch, but Oppenheimer, ever vigilant against the possibility of numbing his audience, complicates the experience with sometimes uncomfortable scenes of Adi’s elderly and infirm parents at home. The film was shot after The Act of Killing was edited but before it was released, and Oppenheimer’s canny stewardship (and brinksmanship) is not irrelevant to their achievement; like Lanzmann, Ophuls, and Panh before him, in purely formal terms he’s set a high bar for chroniclers of violence when it comes to galvanizing an audience.
The Cut The force of Oppenheimer’s storytelling was hard to forget during The Cut, Fatih Akin’s prestige-picture look at Turkey’s Armenian genocide as told through one man’s lost-and-found saga, which reaches all the way to Cuba and the United States. As much as I was rooting for a stirring, definitive account of these events, relentless clichés and broad-brush strokes bog the film down, though the remarkable facts of the film’s existence and reach do endow it with historical significance. It joined a handful of other curiosities I was glad to catch at all: Peter Bogdanovich’s labored sex farce She’s Funny That Way, Saverio Costanzo’s jaw-dropping vegan-momma horror story Hungry Hearts, David Gordon Green’s messy Manglehorn and its confirmation of Al Pacino’s embrace of grumpy old manhood, and (prior to its HBO airing) the two-part serving of Olive Kitteridge, a darkly comic, stingingly apt anatomy of depression across decades of marriage, as portrayed by Frances McDormand (Olive) and Richard Jenkins (long-suffering dear Henry). Fun for the whole family (unless you’re living it).
title: “Festivals Venice” ShowToc: true date: “2024-04-04” author: “Keith Laforge”
In Jackson Heights Like so many of Frederick Wiseman’s films, In Jackson Heights aspires to present a more faithful reflection of the United States. It’s more diverse than most portraits we are offered in contemporary cinema, and more in tune with political and economic pressures on a very pragmatic level. Part of that is due to the demographics of Wiseman’s latest subject, a New York City neighborhood that boasts over 100 nationalities cohabitating in relative harmony, but part of the impression also comes from the filmmaker’s evident desire to show the country as a pluralistic place of possibility energized by immigrants and defined by the potential for positive democratic change. However you view it, the film is an act of portraying history, in especially fresh and vivid form. Perhaps seeing Wiseman’s film very early on in my visit to the Venice Film Festival gave me a perspective I never quite shed, because the practice and process of recounting history was central to so many selections there. Amos Gitai’s Rabin, The Last Day retraces the run-up to and the aftermath of the Israeli Prime Minister’s assassination on November 6, 1995, through reenactments and television footage. In Francofonia, Aleksandr Sokurov weaves together a few strands of his oeuvre (both fiction and nonfiction) to plumb the identity and import of the Louvre Museum, and of art generally, by reference to the Louvre’s survival in World War II thanks to a special Franco-German arrangement. There was even alternative-universe history, in Childhood of a Leader, an origin myth for the archetypal 20th-century fascist dictator, boasting the title of a case study and a conceit that takes the child-is-the-father-to-the-man apothegm to new extremes.
The Event Another world premiere at Venice, The Event, took on history quite literally through its very material. Sergei Loznitsa’s snapshot of St. Petersburg during the attempted Communist coup in August 1991 was fashioned from footage shot at the time by a strikingly alert and curious Soviet camera crew (or, surely, more than one?). You feel something is in the air in the city then known as Leningrad; as the camera roams the streets, people mill about listening to speeches, looking confused and interested, giving speeches, building barricades, and processing the paradigm shift. It’s a privileged peek at a transition captured on film, from an era long overshadowed by the jaw-dropping aftermath of the USSR’s dissolution (look for Putin making an appearance here…). In the movie’s coda, Leningrad’s records office is sealed for posterity, and it’s as if Loznitsa’s film is breaking the seal. Its complex audio collage simulates the chatter of history happening, with ambient street noise and talk, radio broadcasts, speeches, song, and more. The clear black-and-white images make for a ripe contrast with the heroicizing color wide shots of Loznitsa’s Maidan, though there’s a similar Battle of Chile sense of spontaneity. As Communist rule enters its death throes, the people on screen are left to contemplate what the future might or should be, and it’s like seeing the lights turned suddenly on after darkness. If Loznitsa works with the inherited spontaneity of found footage, Sokurov attempts his own sort of collage, with bigger swatches of fabric, in Francofonia. The uncompromising, enveloping mood and technique of Sokurov’s films already gives them a vivid authorial presence, but here especially the extensive use of the director’s voiceover makes it feel like a journal of opinions, observations, and dream fragments. The product is an at times misshapen assemblage of his musings, scenes about Louvre director Jacques Jaujard and art-loving German officer Count Wolff-Metternich zur Gracht, assorted other historical vignettes and personages, and curious dramatic interludes involving a ship carrying a cargo of art on treacherous high seas. Concerned with the survival of art and craftsmanship as vital counterpoint to other human endeavor, it’s tempting to view the feature as a highly intellectualized yet urgent dispatch from an artist in Russia.
Rabin, The Last Day Covering a more recent Event with a capital E, Rabin, The Last Day provides an ever-trenchant reminder of how Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination grew out of implacable religious extremism fundamentally at odds with a political modern democratic conception of the Israeli state. Opening with a long interview excerpt, the film cycles back and forth between reenactments of preparations by Jewish radical Yigal Amir, and the postmortem investigation conducted by a commission. Gitai creates a timely if exhausting record with a clarity that seems to seek some order after the Sisyphean action-reaction chain of events that followed in the 20 years since, though one wishes he didn’t drawn out every other dramatic scene for two or three beats longer than necessary. Not every film at Venice confronted epoch-defining moments. In El Clan, Pablo Trapero digs into the tabloid tale of the 1980s Buenos Aires family whose patriarch ran a brutal kidnapping racket (and one of whose sons was a soccer star). The vision of his wife and children putting up with a screaming kidnap victim under their own roof yields a ready-made allegory for the entanglement of coercion and complicity enforced by a military dictatorship. But it’s also quite satisfying as a dramatic, digestible thriller, laced with dread. Entertaining in quite another way was Luca Guadagnino’s new film, A Bigger Splash. Tilda Swinton and Matthias Schoenaerts play a rock star and her husband on a vacation retreat in Italy, their idyll cracked wide open by a loudmouth music producer (Ralph Fiennes), the old flame of Swinton’s rocker. He brings his footloose daughter (Dakota Johnson)—the film’s origins lie in the previously adapted novel La Piscine. Fiennes is bracingly brash and obnoxious in this boisterous drama of middle-aged romantic gamesmanship and self-mythologizing. It’s about as subtle in seeking effects as I Am Love but entertaining in its own right.
Man Down Turning to the future: Equals stars Kristen Stewart and Nicholas Hoult yearning for each other in an antidepressant dystopian future. While it’s heartening to see Stewart making a go of the airless surroundings, which seek out classical romantic restraint in high-tech circumstances, the film just never quite ignites, and Drake Doremus’s derivative visual design is debilitating, echoing Apple ads of the distant and recent past. Differently maligned, Dito Montiel’s Man Down envisions a postapocalyptic America stalked by Shia LaBeouf as a surviving GI. But what sounds (and often is) faintly ridiculous actually gets some credit for searching for new ways of conveying trauma, one of which is LaBeouf’s on-edge performance. Sampling the Venice Classics of restorations and revivals, I caught a screening of Hardly a Criminal—a 1949 Argentine noir by sometime Hollywood director Hugo Fregonese about a thieving bank employee who endures jail time because he knows where the loot is stashed. While lacking the snap of American counterparts, its laying bare of masculine pride and familial shame was hard to shake. Which brings us to the prize-winning Anomalisa, confoundingly dubbed “a cute piece of Capra corn” by a colleague with whom I must respectfully disagree. The much-anticipated animated feature merits a repeat viewing (after more sleep), but suffice to say that Charlie Kaufman and collaborator Duke Johnson go for it, using outwardly distancing puppet-like characters to enter a fracturing male ego. If that doesn’t sound wholly endearing, it’s not supposed to be—and that’s a good thing.
