Venice Dispatch. 2.

As can be seen from the reports on these pages and elsewhere, the circus moved on from Venice to Toronto a few days ago after George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Charlize Theron and other Hollywood celebrities left Venice to publicize their movies elsewhere. Most of the hacks who left halfway through the Biennale were only out to seek glamour, not art. Mind you, there was not very much of either at this year's Biennale.

Let's start with the bad news in order to end on a more positive note. The selection of the films for the main competition could be described as eclectic (eccentric?) to say the least. To select one Japanese animation feature was acceptable but two seemed excessive, especially as neither merited inclusion. I'm always complaining that most films are made for 12-year-olds, but the cutesy-cutesy Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea seemed to be aimed at 5-year-olds, though the animation was as technically expert as one expects from a Hayao Miyazaki film. The other one, Mamoru Oshii's The Sky Crawlers - a curious, ridiculously long flying epic that seemed to be influenced by British RAF films - had no sequence that could not have been in a non-animation film, which I suppose was its pointless aim.

There was also no excuse for including Werner Schroeter's Nuit de chien (dubbed "Merde de Chien"), an embarrassingly bad and dated futuristic drama, or a dreadful commercial Italian sex "comedy," Il Seme della Discordia, unless it was to please Berlusconi, whose film company, Medusa, produced it.

The American entries were respectable, but rather too familiar, and none of them broke even an inch of new ground. Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married, another in the genre of dysfunctional family get-togethers, had a redundant last 30 minutes, an indulgent home video of the wedding celebrations. Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker (dreadful title) showed how our brave troops are defending freedom in Iraq. Far too close to today's reality for comfort, it is the sort of film, despite Bigelow's protests, that John McCain would approve of. Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, though rather too reminiscent of boxing movies like Champion, The Set-Up and Fat City, nevertheless had a magnificent performance from Mickey Rourke, who seemed to draw on a lifetime of experience to play the ageing, washed-up pro wrestler of the title. Finally, Amir Naderi's Vegas: A True Story, was a riveting study of gambling, addiction and obsession, topics dealt with less schematically, however, in films such as Jacques Demy's La Baie des Anges.

More adventurous was Patrick Mario Bernard and Pierre Trividic's L'Autre, with aspects of early Resnais and Polanski, with a strange William Wilsonian story of a woman jealous of her doppelganger; Semih Kaplanoglu's Milk, another fine Turkish movie, with an original sense of episodic narrative, which moves easily between the realistic and surrealistic, from the sequential to the episodic; and Tariq Teguia's Gabbla (Inland), an Algerian film that shows lonely figures in an unfriendly landscape, where silence is eloquent, while making a poignant non-didactic political statement about the desperate migration of people from third world countries. The film almost made one pronounce this year's Venice Festival a success.

- Ronald Bergan

Posted by dwhudson at September 6, 2008 9:02 AM