COLUMNISTS Every good Venice Film Festival is a gladiatorial spectacle. Even when sculpted lions do not prowl the festival-hosting Lido – pedestalled almost everywhere this year, survivors of a menagerie that once stood outside the Palazzo del Cinema as design motif of the year – it takes little for this event to remind us of Italy’s first empire and bygone clashes, real or apocryphal, in the Colosseum.
Certainties are put to the sword in Venice; thumbs are turned up or down; crowds and critics bay. Even Michael Moore seems to have caught the mood. His new documentary Capitalism: A Love Story, the hottest festival ticket so far, starts its lively onslaught on free-market economics with snippets from an ancient educational movie about the fall of the Roman empire. (Where does Moore dig up these kitsch classics?) Toga’d fools of destiny walk about tall-pillared sets irresistibly reminiscent of modern neoclassical Washington, DC, as glimpses of that tarnished New Rome are ever more pointedly intercut. Crumbling banks, melting money: a new empire tottering.
A few reels on, no less potently, the filmmaker who made Roger and Me is able to say “I told you so”, as the very setting for that debut feature by today’s favourite attack-documentarist – Flint, Michigan, former General Motors headquarters – is revisited as an industrial wasteland that also served a brief recent term (we learn) as America’s main centre for issuing foreclosure notices.
Venice itself, as a city, was born a few hundred years after the fall of Rome. But it too is a poster town for crumbling glory. If Moore’s film won the attention of those seeking epic-scale demolition work, with all the wrecking-ball virtues we know from Sicko and Fahrenheit 9/11 (satire, mockery, contention, argumentativeness), there have been subtler images of downfall and threnodies to obsolescence among Venice’s other movies.
In the afterglow of postmodernism, we even have filmmakers penning weird footnotes to their greatest hits, as if changing times have modulated artistic verities. Todd Solondz’s Life During Wartime, dystopic yet hypnotic, is a sequel like no other. He recasts characters from his great Happiness and guides them through a film shorter yet even mazier. The problem issues and un-American motifs have multiplied: not just paedophilia, sibling rivalry and generational feuding, but talking ghosts, precocious children and, in a late vignette that seems designed to illustrate America’s creepy determination not to grow old or infirm, a smoky-voiced, sumptuously raddled Charlotte Rampling as the kind of singles-bar Medusa who never gives up. “If you’re single, alone and straight – that’s good enough to me,” she husky-tones to an intimidated yet intrigued Ciaran Hinds, playing the first film’s tragi-comic sex molester, now sprung from jail. Life During Wartime is tart, dark and teasing, like a malevolently witty haiku found in a Christmas cracker.
The third Golden Lion contender to date is White Material. French director Claire Denis is in Beau Travail form, bringing a brutal lyricism to a powerful tale. Isabelle Huppert is the coffee farmer holding out during a civil war in her adoptive African country. Rifles and machetes converge on her battered holding, shared with a son and ailing father-in-law (Beau Travail’s Michel Subor). Christopher Lambert comes and goes as her feckless ex-husband, but the dust we watch for in the surrounding red-earth roads is from the tramping rebel troops bringing murder and overthrow. At once unsparing and enigmatic, aloof yet harrowing – Denis withholds nearly all guidance as to where we should direct our sympathies – the film is a superb vehicle for Huppert. This actress, like no other, can make impassiveness, or what seems that, spellbinding, passionate, deeply felt and vividly readable.
Change and decay; crumbling or overthrown certitudes. We used to know, or thought we did, who Werner Herzog was: a gifted Bavarian mystic who composed anthems to monomaniacal achievers (Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo) or the surreal powers of the disadvantaged (Even Dwarves Started Small, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Stroszek).
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| Outside bet:Joseph Chang in ‘Prince of Tears’ |
Both films go to the border of battiness, without quite telling us the purpose of their journeys. Why they were thought worthy to give Herzog a place in Venice Film Festival history – the first director ever to have two films in the same year’s competition – must remain a mystery in the mind of Marco Müller, the man running the mostra del cinema.
There are other mysteries and riddles at Venice this year. Why has the locally resourced festival magazine, a little jewel of bilingual review, comment and opinion-charting, been replaced by a dull Daily Variety, dispensing robotic industry news? (It is like having your neighbourhood café usurped by Starbucks.) Why can’t we find our way round the movie venues, messed up beyond the call of duty by building preparations for a new Palazzo del Cinema? Why is the festival multiplying with confusing subsections? (Can you tell the difference between the films in Giornate Delli Autori and those in Settimana Della Critica?)
Never mind. We critics like to complain. Perhaps we haven’t yet had enough thunderbolts from movies themselves. (Five days still to go.) My own favourite small-sized coup de foudre, and outside bet for a top prize, is Taiwan’s Prince of Tears by the single-name director and ex-designer Yonfan. A story about the martial-law epoch under Chiang Kai Shek is shot like a fairy tale with rainbow colours, heart-stopping little moments of hope, exultation, anguish or despair, and clear hints that Chinese communism, not just Chinese nationalism, is the target of this delicate, perfectly formed onslaught on political tyranny.
