Cannes. Wild Blood.

"A famed acting duo [Osvaldo Valenti (Luca Zingaretti) and Luisa Ferida (Monica Bellucci)] from Italy's Fascist era gets the traditional biopic treatment in Marco Tullio Giordana's disappointing Wild Blood," writes Jay Weissberg in Variety.

"One of those nagging projects that sat so long on hold that the normally nuanced helmer no longer has any distance, pic plays like small screen melodrama, toying with the fascist/partisan conflict in only the most superficial ways while aiming to rehabilitate the famed couple with an unconvincing explanation for the accusations that led to their execution."

"A grandly-mounted but turgid prestige piece, Wild Blood attempts to give tragic heft to the lives of two of Italian cinema's more disreputable figures," writes Jonathan Romney in Screen Daily. "Marco Tullio Giordana won considerable kudos in 2003 with The Best of Youth, but Wild Blood is a creakily traditional, anonymous World War II drama."

"[S]ome are already screaming 'revisionism' and accusing the director of justifying the actions of the pair, who were allegedly accomplices to torture, although her guilt, at least, was dubitable at the time," writes Natasha Senjanovic in the Hollywood Reporter. "Yet Giordana never makes apologies for them." And she notes that the film received "a 10-minute standing ovation."

Camillo de Marco has a few comments from Giordana at Cineuropa.

This was a "Special Screening."

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Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 08.

Last year: Cannes @ 60. And Cannes 06.

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Posted by dwhudson at June 1, 2008 7:56 AM