Venice Dispatch. 5.

It took a film made in 1976, Fellini's Il Casanova and the competition film Sympathy for Lady Vengeance by Park Chan-wook to remind me what the Venice film festival is all about: a showcase of world-class art cinema.

Granted, we're halfway into the screenings and there will be more to come, but critics and cineastes seem perennially torn between their desire for more aesthetic work or more traditional narrative development. This critic appreciates and welcomes the aesthetic. Hollywood-type movies, whether or not they're made in the US, can be seen any day, in any town. At Venice, the expectation is for ground-breaking cinematic innovation.

Regrettably, Terry Gilliam's The Brothers Grimm, competing for the Golden Lion, was a major disappointment, not least to Gilliam fans. There is some Gilliam in there, but the film sticks to its potboiler agenda. Still, it took an entire hour to get into the film, and with almost every twist and turn, small groups of spectators exited the Palagalileo theatre. Not that The Brothers Grimm is without its rewards: there are some exquisite moments of cinema magic, such as the mirror phase in the tower, where an evil queen sleeps, scheming to remain forever young, played by the "Lido Diva," as she is called in La Repubblica, Monica Bellucci. (The Italian actress reveals that she is not interested in the label, claiming that this is a designation that applies to women only during a particular time in their life.) It may be a minor point, but Matt Damon's English accent is terrible; worse, his performance is less than animate. Heath Ledger, who is indeed omnipresent at the festival, with roles in Brokeback Mountain and Casanova, fairs better, displaying a wider dramatic range in his role as a foolhardy young man - hardly a Casanova.

Fellini's Il Casanova is required viewing in the wake of the popular success here of Lasse Hallström's Casanova. Here the complexities of the story of Giacomo Casanova are revealed, not least in recitations from his work addressing the mysteries of alchemy and the philosopher's stone. Fellini didn't rent Venice for a day as Hallström did during last year's Carnevale - he worked in a studio, reconstructing the Rialto Bridge and using black plastic to simulate the Venetian lagoon. Donald Sutherland (his voice proficiently dubbed by Gigi Proietti to allow for the authenticity of the language) was on hand to talk about working with Fellini. Of course, an Italian might have been cast, but Fellini told him that, even as he spoke his lines in English, he was to live within the role, let it happen; Sutherland was highly regarded by Fellini, so Casanova he was.

A virtue of Hallström's Casanova is that he provides a woman's angle on the story. Today we need one. Hallström's Casanova is open to the suggestions of women at a time when women were believed to have no soul. Fellini's Casanova agrees that a small soul is better than none (men were said to have several), and a little girl offers her opinion as to why the myth of the Immaculate Conception lacks credibility. Otherwise, Fellini creates exquisite moments in scene after scene; this is a film not enslaved to narrative but to the revelations of his unique visual imagery. The restoration of the film began in 2001 under the supervision of cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno, and the decision to screen it at this year's festival was an excellent one.

Park Chan-wook's Sympathy for Lady Vengeance is every bit the cliff-hanger that Oldboy was. Maybe Takeshi Kitano should be observant of how Park portrays women in this tale of revenge. Each scene is embedded with visual information, handcrafted for just the right effect like the final touches of a magnificent mural painting. The "story" is about a woman who has assisted a man in abducting a child who was later murdered. She does time. The prison exposé focuses not only on her but on the other female inmates as well and is rich, layered and complex. Her plan to find the man who abducted the child is laid out piece by piece, interwoven with the story of her being reunited with a daughter she had to give up for adoption while in prison. She naturally gravitates to situations which allow for atonement; yet her religious guilt ransacks her mind, even if she claims she has converted to Buddhism. The film is shot through with numerous instances of premeditated vengeance which may jar the viewer, especially just because it is a woman, but at the same time, there is enough terrain here for one to fully take in the experience. So far, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance has my vote for this year's Golden Lion.

Posted by dwhudson at September 6, 2005 1:55 AM