Dripping with sweat, exhausted with combat and challenge, inured to darkness yet desperate for sleep. Who said a critic’s life was easy at a leading film festival? Here on the Adriatic, the humidity is off the chart, the films are beyond count and there is no exit strategy from an island quarantined for its annual plague of movie mania. Some colleagues are already starting to look like Dirk Bogarde in Death in Venice. Minds tottering, sun lotion running, they waste picturesquely away on the Lido.
But no: culture is no laughing matter and the opening description – trial by claustrophobia and high stress levels – more properly belongs to the best competition film so far. Israel’s Lebanon has everything: a powerful plot, prodigious direction (all the more so for a film set entirely inside a tank) and a passport to international controversy since the title invokes the 1982 Lebanese war. In a week that sees a concurrent film festival, Toronto, engulfed by Arab protest for screening a season of movies about Tel Aviv, Venice showcases this tale of four Israeli soldiers traversing 24 hours of nightmare – battle, entrapment, horror, death – in a war of (antagonists will claim) Israel’s own provoking.
Yet the main or only crime of Samuel Maoz’s film is mis-titling. It isn’t about the Lebanon war at all. It is about battle, all battle, and what it does inside men’s heads. The tank is not offered as a metaphor for that location, but it’s hard not to see this cramped shell where emotion and delirium are incubated as an expressionist vision of a soldier’s brain. Simultaneously, no film has more powerfully suggested the actuality of being in a tank. The oil-and-water-puddled floor; the grime of faces and the imagined stink of bodies; the darkness; the wrench and grind of the turning gun turret, its cross-haired sights our only view, for 90 minutes, of the outside world.
At one point a scared Syrian prisoner is dumped in the tank for convenience, then horrifically menaced in Arabic by a Phalangist ally-intruder, who at the end of his torture litany turns to the Israelis and says, in their language: “Treat him carefully, he is a prisoner of war.” Irony with a lethal edge. In the final scenes, even the irony runs out. The occupants are trapped in a ruined city prowled by the enemy, their only hope to choke the tank’s dying engine into final action and thunder down the nearest maze of alleys into escape or catastrophe. This formidable film transcends flags of nationhood to raise the universal, spectral ensign of war itself.
Before Lebanon was shown, it looked as if women would have the best collective shout in the festival’s polemical reaches. Egypt’s Scheherazade, Tell Me a Story and the German-directed, UK-filmed Desert Flower are both designed to stir controversy. The first has done so already in its native land, Yousry Nasrallah’s furore-inciting film centring on a woman TV interviewer who publicly airs three stories – including her own – about females bullied or battered by a patriarchal Arab society.
Desert Flower is a biopic about Waris Dirie, the Somali-born supermodel turned international campaigner against female circumcision. This grisly ancestral ritual deserved a stronger and more single-minded film. Director Sherry Horman trundles through an hour of rags-to-riches plotting and Britcom humour (Timothy Spall as a cuddly fashion photographer, Juliet Stevenson as an Ab Fab-mannered agent) before delivering the thematic coup de grâce.
Romania’s Francesca, a woman-centred story of racism and exploitation, has brought a lawsuit from Italy’s Alessandra Mussolini, granddaughter of Benito. Signorina Mussolini’s comments about immigrants from Italy’s near neighbour provoke a character in the film to call her various names, of which the kindest is “slut”.
Tunisia and Iran, not to be outdone on controversy, contributed respectively Buried Secrets, about three female servants getting their own back on the villa-owning classes (North-Africanising Jean Genet’s The Maids) and Women without Men, the Iranian video artist Shirin Neshat’s attempt, patchy but visually arresting, to take her gender-championing message to the movie screen.
Weren’t there some simple, entertaining, non-controversial films in Venice? Well, yes. No one grinds a political axe, or grinds his teeth with socio-existential angst, in Jacques Rivette’s 36 vues du Pic Saint Loup. Jane Birkin and Sergio Castellito play two mid-life charmers who meet in the ambit of a circus, one of those travelling affairs – both the circus and their romance – that the French sketch with so deft a blend of low-key philosophing and high-resolution, on-the-hoof humanity.
Pipilotti Rist’s Pepperminta is demented but oddly winning: a multicoloured Swiss-Austrian whimsy about a madcap girl who goes about spreading song, anarchy and mischief. In any normal country she would be arrested. In the country called Cinema, she is a saint and saviour.
Zestier than anything was Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant!. This truth-based comedy about white-collar crime jettisons all pretence to indignation or anti-capitalist sermonising; it just enjoys the laughter ride. Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon), the man who blew the whistle on his agri-industrial company’s bosses for price-fixing, was a pathological liar who in-advertently sent himself to jail for longer than his employers.
Soderbergh has a light touch on the story tiller; composer Marvin Hamlisch’s droll jazz score punctuates big-band sound with tin whistle and penny flute; Damon dons a chestnut wig and moustache to give his best performance since The Talented Mr Ripley.
We who found our way around the new festival had, finally, a happy time. If you couldn’t determine where the cinemas were, lost in the boardwalk jungle around the Palazzo Nuovo building site (completion date 2012), a colleague suggested the best idea was to throw yourself in the Adriatic. You would then drift down-current till rescued by Excelsior Hotel waiters, peerlessly courteous and primed to show the way to the best screening venues.
The competition began with a film about the end of the world, on the basis that after that things could only get more upbeat. John Hillcoat’s medium-powerful The Road is based on Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel (apart from an arguably otiose role for Charlize Theron as the hero Viggo Mortensen’s flashbacked wife). The images are ashenly powerful. The main performances, from Mortensen and Australian newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee as his son, are fierce and felt. Only a sporadic sense that action scenes are being spooned in to vary the despair speaks, perhaps, of the rumoured quarrels between Hillcoat and the producing Weinstein brothers.
Italy itself continues to talk a better movie than it makes. We were drum-banged till nearly deaf about Giuseppe Tornatore’s Baarìa – costliest Italian film ever, hundreds of characters, sets to rival DW Griffith – only to view an inflated soap operetta that hauls itself across 20th-century history, from Il Duce to Italo-communism, exploding every so often with the pinpricks of its own portentous bathos. Filmgoers will never forget Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso, the director seems to assume (probably rightly). To ensure they remain in that state of happy recall, barely a scene goes by without a glinting urchin boy smiling at the camera, a haze-haloed scene in a movie theatre, or the sunbaked jabber of small-town life.
The other home-made films in competition were scarcely better. Michele Placido’s Il grande sogno (The Great Dream) also combines historical sweep with pomp and sentimentality. Giuseppe Capotondi’s La doppia ora (The Double Hour) is a murder thriller whose lease on ingenuity runs out after hour number one.
My advice? Take off your shirts, make sure they each bear the right name tags, and put them without further hesitation on Lebanon. The Golden Lion will be announced on Saturday night. If Venice’s top prize does not go to this Israeli film I shall eat my hat. For that purpose I have chosen a natty and stylish Death in Venice number, a fedora made entirely of white Veneto liquorice.
Nigel Andrews is the FT’s film critic
