Venice Dispatch. 1.

Whenever I arrive in Venice by train and leave the station, I feel like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz entering the land of Oz. Unfortunately, all the hacks at the Venice Film Festival are stuck on the Lido which, toute proportion gardée, is like Alcatraz for nearly two weeks from which we have no time to escape. Every day I look longingly over the water and see the buildings around the Piazza San Marco. As I'm on the International Critics' Jury (Fipresci), which has to judge the films in the main competition, I look just as longingly over at the other ostensibly more interesting sections - Horizons and the Critics Week.

Until now I have seen six out of the 21 films we are obliged to see, therefore it is rather too early to assess the quality of the competion films as a whole, but so far so bad. It's strange how many of the films start promisingly and then tail off disappointingly. This was most manifest in Takeshi Kitano's Achilles and the Tortoise which begins with a delightful animated illustration of Zeno's paradox of the title.

There follows an entrancing tale of a young boy fanatically obsessed by drawing and painting. He takes lessons from a master and befriends a simple-minded man with a tic, who can also not stop painting. Alas, just as I was placing it on a par with Im Kwon-Taek's Chihwaseon, this parable of artistic passion deteriorates into a broad comedy where the noble theme is degraded, echoing the phrase "Art is a hoax," expressed by a character at one stage. The painter in middle-age is played by Kitano with a self-amused air, and all the paintings, vividly realised and photographed, are by the director himself. There is a visual pleasure to be had from the paintings, whether original or pastiches of Picasso, Matisse, Miró or Warhol, so it is a pity that Kitano seems to be putting down both the character and the paintings.

Both Barbet Schroeder's Inju, la bete dans l'ombre and Nelson Yu Lik-Wai's Plastic City are about foreigners in an alien land, the former about a French novelist in Japan, the latter about Chinese gangsters in Brazil. The Schroeder film begins with an extract from a patently bad Japanese supernatural movie which is then discussed rather seriously by the French writer, an admirer of the reclusive Japanese novelist on which the film was based. Gradually, however, the film develops exactly into the sort of genre thriller it seemed to be taking off.

Former cinematographer Lik-Wai's Plastic City is grotesquely derivative of every Hong Kong and Taiwanese gangster movie over the last decades with added clichés from Brazilian gang warfare films set in the favelas. It is not only excessively violent but pretentious in that it feigns to making a point about the way greed is ruining the Brazilian rain forest. The best part of the film is a stunning credit sequence. If only it had ended there.

Up to now, the selection has been slightly redeemed by Christian Petzold's Jerichow, though the plot is rather too reminiscent of The Postman Always Rings Twice and its variations, and Guillermo Arriaga's The Burning Plain. This is a first feature by the Mexican Arriaga, who wrote Alejandro González Iñárritu's first three feature films: Amores perros (2000), 21 Grams (2003) and Babel (2006) and, like those films, especially the last two, it has an intriguingly multi-layered interrelated plot playing cryptically with time and space. In a way, due in part to Arriaga, this kind of screenplay has become rather a trend. Nicely photographed by Robert Elswit on the US-Mexican border, it is played rather solemnly on one note by a cast headed by Charlize Theron and Kim Basinger.

Despite the straight-jacket imposed on me by the main competion films, I couldn't resist straying into Abbas Kiarostami's Shirin, which is showing out of competition and to which I'll return in my next dispatch. Radical both in style and content, it has been, for me at least, the highlight of the Venice Festival, besides seeing 99-year-old Manoel de Oliveira, three of whose short films are showing here, standing up and waving his white hat and stick in acknowledgment of a standing ovation.

- Ronald Bergan

Posted by dwhudson at August 30, 2008 11:22 AM