Venice Dispatch. 10.

The Italian journalists think that Good Night and Good Luck is so far the best film in the international competition. But of course, journalists don't make that decision. Maurizio Porro of the Corriere della Sera complained yesterday that the festival is too long and that any fest director who could cut it down to a week would be made a saint. Yet clearly even twelve days is not enough for a festival with roughly 360 screenings. Some films are shown twice, others three times, in order to give journalists and media students and teachers time to see them. Italian director Cristina Comencini's film La bestia nel cuore (Don't Tell) was only screened for the press once, with two public screenings, apparently because the film will soon go to theatrical release. But for international journalists the film will be "Don't See." How many of these films will come to a theater near you will depend on distributors, but then, there are also other film festivals (I'm scouting for Göteborg).

In the closing days of the festival, it's not hard to feel the tension during the screenings. The energy in the huge theaters is electric and it is not always easy to ignore the muffled discussions, walkouts and cell phones dispatching SMS messages about the film up on the screen. This impatience is a sign that the festival is dragging on, clearly not a problem in the first few days. The fest continues to be a complicated obstacle course with the security checks that buzz when "contraband" like eyeglass cases set them off. Guards are everywhere, watching everything, zipping over to you in a flash to tell you that you can't do whatever it is you're doing. The rules aren't clear. It's best to simply say, "okay"; it's painless. One journalist from Croatia was glad to be going to Toronto for this very reason, though. There are long lines in the press room; and for fast food. Despite all this, I'll be back next year. I love this festival situated on the edge of the Lido beach and I've even managed to swim a couple of times in the ocean.

The Venezia 62 international jury, headed up by production designer Dante Ferretti, is comprised of the Chinese screenwriter and author Acheng, French filmmaker Claire Denis, Israeli director Amos Gitai, German director Edgar Reitz, the Italian film composer (raised in Iceland) Emiliana Torrini and indie producer Christine Vachon. We await their Golden Lion announcement on Saturday, though of course, the awards are not the sole point of any festival. With 360 screenings, how could the be. As with other large festivals, media coverage of Venice overly focuses the major industry products and actors. This year that would be Lasse Hallström's Casanova, because it's set in Venice, Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain, because, like Venice, it's daring, and Terry Gilliam's The Brothers Grimm, because of Monica Bellucci. Oddly, Heath Ledger is the common denominator in all three.

Laurent Cantet's Heading South (Vers le Sud), drawing on material from Haitian radio journalist Dany Laferrière, stars Charlotte Rampling as a French literature professor from Boston who goes to Haiti for unencumbered relationships. This French production explores sex as currency in Haiti during Papa Doc Duvalier's regime; middle-aged white women would come to Port au Prince for romance and sex in the 1970s. Usually this involved shopping tours, meals and drinks, or offers to secure passports for the young Haitian men. Perhaps to make a point - that the women did real harm - Cantet throws in a mystery never really explained involving Legba, the young man everyone wants. Probably the most ludicrous scene is a trope perennially featured in films about Haiti wherein Karen Young, doped up on valium and alcohol, is supposedly possessed by the drum beats of Vodou while a local dance band plays for hotel guests. Fortunately, Legba puts a stop to this quickly enough, if only for the sake of the audience.

Featured in the Venice Days section is Pasquale Scimeca's The Passion of Joshua the Hebrew, the story of a young Jew exiled from Spain with his people in 1492. Joshua is chosen to be in a Passion Play by the local priests because of his religious acumen and is later crucified. No matter how interesting it is to consider Mary as one of the disciples who wrote a gospel in Abel Ferrara's Mary, Scimeca's film is more proficiently executed and manages to capture the essence of this historical material. It is contemporary enough to be of relevance to young audiences without making a statement on Mel Gibson (now hard at work on a film about Papa John XXIII and Vatican II).

A surprise awaited me in the International Critics Week selection, the best film I have seen in this section to date: Asi, by Jesus Mario Lozano. In an innovative formal choice acclaimed by the audience, all the shots of the film are 32 seconds each and captured at 11.32 pm each night. The film diary is about a young man from Monterrey who works as an assistant to two street actors. This eventually becomes a threesome. Like Sergei Eisenstein, Ivan (Roberto Garcia Suarez) thinks Monterrey is a horrible place to be. And maybe for that reason he puts up with the demands of the two actors, but it wouldn't be the same story if he hadn't made better use of the digital camera his visually impaired friend Oliver gives him. Lozano does it well enough for him.

Romance and Cigarettes is a rather uninspiring title for a film in the wake of Coffee and Cigarettes. I am glad the film was not a complete letdown like the collection of minimalist character sketches in Jim Jarmusch's dull film. But Jarmusch came back with Broken Flowers, so all is forgiven.

John Turturro has made a well-crafted film and the surprisingly trite title comes from a line from his lead character, Nick Murder, played by James Gandolfini: "All a man wants is a little romance and to smoke his brains out." Granted, the characters don't light up and mate swap as often as in Stanley Kwan's Everlasting Regret (Changhen Ge) - more on that film later. Although Turturro has based his film on the fun and games of his neighborhood in Queens, I'm glad it was not my neighborhood nor my world. The directors says the singing and dancing were added for comic relief from these workers' everyday lives, but for the most part, the women in the film hold a rotten set of cards and it's not always funny, despite the "dirty jokes," as Turturro calls them, mostly about women but also about men and a host of clichés. Stereotypes range from the "diesel dyke" at the café to the gay "hookers" at a local flophouse hanging out the window or "lamely" joining in on the choreography. Firemen and construction workers sing on sight and their wives and lovers don't miss a beat. Kate Winslet plays a Cockney fake redhead and hooker named Tula, Murder's "flame," who works in a lingerie store, sings and dances well and appears in a memorable underwater scene. She also threatens Murder's life at home with wife Kitty Kane (Susan Sarandon) and three daughters Rosebud (Aida Turturro), Constance (Mary-Louise Parker) and Baby (Mandy Moore). They, too, break into song when members of a rock band set up in the backyard, and this is fun. Christopher Walken, Kumar Pallana, Eddie Izzard and Steve Buscemi fill in as comic sidekicks. Even Barbara Sukowa shows up. But one of the more outrageous performances is from Nick's mother Grace, played by Elaine Stritch. Perhaps one of the more "entertaining" films in the competition, but not the best for it.

Stanley Kwan's period piece, Everlasting Regret, about a former Miss Shanghai, follows all the men in her life and all the disappointments that come with their betrayal. As a beauty queen, she's enjoyed considerable attention and yet is always abandoned. Kwan says the film is an homage to Old Shanghai before the political disturbances of 1949, based on the novel by Wang Anyi, considered one of the best of the 1990s. The complicated and wooden plot fails to convey the novel meaningfully and most of the softly lit indoor shots are insufficient to drum movie magic.

I was finally able to catch two Chinese films in the Secrets of Asian Cinema series, where, oddly enough, you can easily find an empty seat. The films run from 9 am to 11 pm and, with great fortune, I saw the ones I'd penciled in at the beginning of the festival: Zonglie tu (The Valiant Ones, 1975) by King Hu and Wutai jiemei (Stage Sisters, 1965) by Xie Jin. Hu, who left mainland China for Hong Kong in 1949 and started his own studio in Taiwan, was the first Chinese director to be awarded at Cannes for A Touch of Zen. For making Stage Sisters, Xie Jin was eventually imprisoned for being a "bourgeois humanist" during the early years of the Cultural Revolution.

In The Valiant Ones, a group of peasants and intellectuals, all of equal skill, including one proficient and fierce turban-bearing woman, successfully battle against Chinese-Japanese pirates during the Ming dynasty. The battles are majestically choreographed.

Stage Sisters is about two women who work for a small countryside opera. Eventually they move to Shanghai and become successful artists. The plight of Chun hua is more complicated as she first joins the troupe after escaping an arranged marriage, refuses to sleep with a military chief, is publically shamed for three days and is almost blinded for working independently in Shanghai. Later she joins the Cultural Revolution and creates operas for the people.

After viewing Stage Sisters, Stanley Kwan's film seemed to fade, the story of Chun hua braver than the one of a former beauty queen. Here, after all, is life in Old and New Shanghai in this newly restored print. The actors in both films are neither inanimate nor wooden and we can be glad their work has been revitalized in this important retrospective.

I have to revise my opinion on the best film in the international competition, or at least add another film to the top of the heap. Screening on the next to the last day of the festival, it was well worth the wait: The Constant Gardener, Fernando Meirelles's adaptation of John Le Carré's novel, should walk away with some award, if not the Golden Lion. For starters, the cinematography and editing are stunningly beautiful. The setting is northern Kenya and the story is a thriller that explores the chain of events - though not chronologically - leading up to the murder of activist Tessa Quayle (Rachel Weisz). César Charlone is the DP and what a glorious job he's done with fantastic tracking shots, close-ups and objects in motion. Tessa accompanies her husband Justin (Ralph Fiennes), a UK foreign service diplomat to Kenya. While in the UK and during their courtship, Tessa was already fired up about the question of UN humanitarian aid. In Africa, she becomes more intimately involved with the questionable dispersal of medicine by the UN and pharmaceutical empires to Africans for treating HIV, AIDS and TB. What impresses most is the stark contrast between images of Africans' everyday lives and the pompous, filthy rich rooms and golf greens of UK government officers.

Hiyao Miyazaki, a lifetime achievement award winner at Venice, said he is here because of festival director Marco Müller's passion. The relayed translation from Japanese to Italian to English was extremely basic but I managed to make some sense of his words. He doesn't have a DVD player nor does he send email. This extremely humble man with a mild sense of humor makes animation for all ages. His characters are the people around him, like us, right there in the press room.

Miyazaki doesn't want to explain his films; he told me he simply wants people to see them. He has said that, though his films are for everyone, he wants children to see things that are useful; he doesn't want them protected from the lessons of life. One Italian woman raised on his anime thanked him for that. One interesting remark was that young animators and filmmakers see their work through lenses, whereas he has been influenced by the perspectives in painting. As far as other influences, Howl's Moving Castle, his latest film, is based on a book by Diana Wynn Jones, who, in turn, has been inspired by the The Wizard of Oz. As a recent convert to manga and anime, due to the efforts of this magnificent craftsman, it was a privilege to see him and hear what he had to say.

Posted by dwhudson at September 9, 2005 8:59 AM