Venice. Fallen Heroes.

At Cineuropa, Boyd van Hoeij notes that Italian director director Paolo Franchi is calling his Nessuna qualità agli eroi (Fallen Heroes) "a noir as black as the shadows and the dark of night."

Ronnie Scheib, writing in Variety, finds it "a brooding, intense variation on Strangers on a Train, [in which] two men (Bruno Todeschini and Elio Germano) swap the same murder. Filmed mainly at night or in cold light, against the gray water and austere architecture of Turin, pic is an unrelenting study in Oedipal angst. Despite its visually compelling style and two magnificently dysfunctional perfs, pic finally fails to ring enough variations on its father-fixation theme."

Updated through 9/3.

Update, 9/3: "Paolo Franchi is the true heir to Antonioni among the current crop of young Italian directors," writes Lee Marshall at Screen Daily: "[H]e's fascinated by passive, blocked, brooding characters, by emotions that can hardly be translated into images, let alone words. And like the films of the late lamented Ferrarese maestro, both Franchi's promising debut La Spettatrice and his current Venice competition entry feel like ongoing thought processes rather than finished, wrapped and bundled creative efforts."

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Covering the coverage: Venice 07. Index.

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Posted by dwhudson at September 1, 2007 4:18 PM