In Venice, the film festival is still in top form: Contributions by Dennis Villeneuve, Pablo Larrain, Shirin Neshat – and Led Zeppelin.
There they are again, the screaming teenagers on the jetty. While the festival management walled up the red carpet with ugly partitions, the real fans lined up on the canale – just as you know it from old biennial pictures from the 50s. The modern autograph book is the cell phone, and the star of the hour is Timothée Chalamet. With his leading role in the blockbuster “Dune”, the dark-haired 25-year-old should have finally worked his way into the top league of Hollywood stars. As soon as he has disappeared to the press conference in the Casino Palast, you can see a few dozen beaming fans uploading their Chalamet photos: smiling and greeting them with the peace sign, he left them with a spark of glamor.
You will not share the concerns of some US film critics as to whether Warner Brothers will get its investment back with the formally demanding epic. No screen is big enough for the dimensions of his film, director Dennis Villeneuve had explained in advance – as if he could delay the evaluation on streaming platforms for a long time. Can you save the cinema by simply framing the images so wide that the actors in them look like extras in “Lawrence of Arabia”?
In fact, the desert worm alone, which only provides the first action scene after an hour, should measure several hundred meters. The spaceships that head for the planet Arrakis to exploit its natural resources (the hallucinogenic “Spice”) are like flying cities. And the time also works tremendously in this 155-minute prelude to other “Dune” chapters. Only Chalamet, with his fine facial features as the black-clad prince’s son Paul Atreides, is more reminiscent of the filigree Johnny Depp in “Edward Scissorhands”.
Perhaps Tim Burton would have been the more appropriate director for the remake of Frank Herbert’s novel. It is quite impressive how Villeneuve refuses to accept the fast cutting frequency and abundance of effects of the usual blockbuster cinema. What he sets against it is a theatrical pathos, monumental and yet minimalist – against a backdrop like in a Bayreuth production by Wieland Wagner from the fifties. Hans Zimmer’s music underlines this modernist claim with lead-heavy harmonies. Even the best thing about it would be even more effective on a theater stage: the Oscar-worthy costumes in their New Romantic style.
Only one film was still more popular in the chronically overbooked ticket system of this festival, Pablo Larrain’s Lady Diana biopic “Spencer”. Here the relationship between entertainment expectations and artistic demands is even more extreme. Located in 1991 during a few days of a Christmas holiday with the royal family at Sandringham House in Norfolk, it dresses the princess’s inner demarcation process in often surreal images. Queen Elisabeth is reduced to an almost silent supporting character, Prince Charles speaks most of his brief dialogue on a pheasant hunt.
Kristen Stewart carries the film almost alone in an unheard-of performance, her face, made up to astonishing resemblance, mimically tells an inner monologue of immense dimensions. In the history of film this has not happened too often, with Carl Theodor Dreyer in the silent film “The Passion of Joan of Arc” and with Polanski in “Disgust”. Pablo Larrain’s “Jackie” already gave an inkling of his talent for stylizing historical tableaus into irritating picture puzzles. But there is also a subliminal surrealism that might force a price – the scene in which Diana spoons the pearls of her necklace instead of the starter is unforgettable.
In the first four days, Venice had a better program than Cannes in all of its competition. And that continues in the sub-sections: Bernhard MacMahon’s documentary “Becoming Led Zeppelin” sets standards for future rockumentaries. Based on interviews with the surviving band members, he introduces the thriving music scene of Swinging London in the sixties. Guitarist Jimmy Page and bassist John Paul Jones were among the most sought-after studio musicians even as teenagers, anonymously shining on many of the greatest pop hits of the era. The rousing reconstruction of the musical influences of one of the most innovative rock bands only becomes an event thanks to the quality of the archive films. It’s unbelievable what treasures can still be found in television and amateur archives today.
In the Orizzonti section, the Iranian-American artists Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari show their film adaptation of Jean-Claude Carrière’s last screenplay. The veteran of the auteur film died last February at the age of 89.
“Land of Dreams” is an artful satire on a US immigration policy turned into xenophobic. On behalf of the government, a young woman of Iranian descent is on the way to interview her fellow citizens for a census. What the government wants to research and catalog are the migrants’ secret dreams. In their floating-distancing staging, the film artists seem to orientate themselves with another temporary US immigrant, Bertolt Brecht. Ultimately, it is only the cinema that is the land of unlimited possibilities.
