The search for worthwhile films at the Venice Festival has seldom been this easy – competition entries from Ukraine, Italy and France.
After two thirds of the festival, even a chronically overbooked ticket system can lose its horror. Film critics are hunters and gatherers and are obviously not too bothered by lurking at any time of the day or night for the moment when a returned card appears again in the online system. A few days before the end of the bathing season, the Lidostrand compensates for the gaps that still open up in the program. A Venetian friend also went there among the collectors and explains to me how to track down the living clams in the sea of shells that he needs for his evening spaghetti Vongole. They dig themselves vertically in the sand, but it is of little use to them. “Don’t you critics do the same?” – “Right, first we find the good guys and then we kill them.”
But joking aside: seldom has a film festival been so poor in mistakes. Even the problematic Ukrainian competition entry “Reflection” did not justify the booing concert at the end of the press screening. The film artist Valentyn Vasyanovych (two years ago he won the Orrizonte section here with “Atlantis”) is known for long, static shots. This time a trade journal counted 29 image changes in 125 minutes. The imperturbability of the film style corresponds in the tragic climax with the mercilessness of a torture scene.
A doctor was persuaded by his son-in-law to accompany him to occupied Crimea. When the torturers lead him to the scene of their crime – a former center for contemporary art – the man can no longer be helped.
The problem with this film is not the treatment of an actual war crime. It is the amount of colportage that the filmmaker loads into the sterile digital photography of his scenes. Is it necessary for the doctor to give his lifeless friend a “mercy death” in order to finally travel home with the heaviest conscience after an exchange of prisoners? Festival director Alberto Barbera, on the other hand, proved a safer hand with the otherwise often little award-worthy costume films.
Mario Martone’s Italian contribution “The King of Laughter” woos its audience in the light tone of a tabloid comedy from the milieu of a turn-of-the-century boulevard theater. The subject is very topical, however, it is about a copyright dispute that the Neapolitan comedian and theater maker Eduardo Scarpetta led after a lawsuit by Gabriele D’Annunzio. Scarpetta had parodied a play by the ultra-nationalist poet pope who, in return, accused him of intellectual theft. Martone approaches the complex authorship debate so easily that one could end up with his film like Scarpetta himself: one is tempted to underestimate him, but that would be downright unfair.
The latest work by Frenchman Xavier Giannoli, on the other hand, is luxurious. “Illusions perdues” is a film adaptation of the Balzac novel of the same name from 1843; the almost two and a half hours concentrate on the middle section “A great man from the provinces in Paris”. Benjamin Voisin plays the up-and-coming poet Lucien, who is making a career as a literary critic in the up-and-coming newspaper journalism, but is lost in a corrupt system that would be called “cultural industries” today. It is not difficult to search for topicalities in Balzac’s razor-sharp analysis of the class system and his critical view of the early mass media. Giannoli spreads them carefully in front of us, in brilliant dialogues and with love for detail like a second Bertolucci.
That would be the only thing that could argue against this culinary film – the cinema is not being reinvented here, its elegance is of the kind that would have been celebrated at this festival fifty years ago. And surely the film industry would have wiped out its hereditary enemy, the guild of critics, who are supposedly blind to true beauty.
“When two critics meet on a boat on the Sea of Galilee,” an author starts jokingly in “Lost Illusions”: “In front of them, Jesus is walking on the water. One of them says: Look, he can’t even swim. “
