Something seductive between art and genre: the Venice Film Festival with a radiant Penélope Cruz in “L’Immensitá” by Emanuele Crialese, bloody by Luca Guadagnino and masterful by Paul Schrader.
Beauty is fleeting, but not for everyone. It’s unfair, but it’s also gratifying, at least for Penélope Cruz’s audience. If you also see her in an Italian film like “L’Immensitá” by Emanuele Crialese, which takes place in the seventies, she reminds you of another always favored in this respect – the great Sophia Loren. As a loving mother of three whom she tries in vain to protect from the shambles of her crumbling marriage, Cruz actually plays a role that the Roman diva could have played during this time as well.
But maybe not quite as well. Because the vital energy of a woman who prefers to join the pranking children under the table during dinner is also finite. And so, in the end, alongside the marriage, their own depression becomes a tragedy that is painstakingly hidden.
But just as Potemkin villages cannot be maintained indefinitely, a great leading actress can make a film forget its weaknesses on its own: the role of the father played by Vincenzo Amato is completely underexposed, rather superimposed interspersed musical dream sequences in the San Remo style. And the important sideline of the daughter, who feels like a boy, should have been much more in the foreground.
Sometimes the most beautiful thing about the Venice Festival – the reminder of the heyday of Italian cinema that can be felt everywhere – also becomes a burden: as a yardstick at an unreachable distance.
The classics section with restored versions, which was put on hold last year, is back. These include Luciano Salce’s forgotten 1962 comedy La voglia matta. It’s a sort of fake Fellini in the guise of a seemingly featherweight entertainment film. Ugo Tognazzi plays an aging engineer who is stopped on a car trip by a horde of young people. Confused by the mischievous sham advances of a 16-year-old (played by Catherine Spaak, who died last April), he becomes the group’s helpless plaything.
It’s a kind of afternoon version of Federico Fellini’s “Dolce Vita” – without the melancholy of this film, but with an amazingly keen eye for the new youth culture. While Tognazzi tries to score points with a war memoir, the youngsters are amused by the 1945 single of a Hitler speech as a shrill curiosity alongside the hits of the season.
But last year’s screaming teenage girls are back too, and again they’re only coming for Timothée Chalamet. In “Bones and All” by Luca Guadagnino, the Hollywood star and Taylor Russell are perhaps the most disturbing cinematic lovers since “Wild at Heart”. They are brought together by a strange disposition that condemns them to an underground life – they are cannibals. Unlike vampirism, while not contagious, they leave nothing of their victims behind to cause further harm.
One could translate the title as “with skin and hair,” but that’s a variant that they leave to a really creepy fellow who becomes an annoying companion. As sensual as his film “Call Me By Your Name” and as in love with the genre as in his “Suspiria” remake, Guadagnino combines qualities of both films to create a deep black romance. Or maybe one should rather say: deep red.
It is probably the most controversial competition film in this Venice edition so far, but it is a worthy continuation of a film-historical line in fantastic cinema: it leads from Todd Browning and Jacques Tourneur to Dario Argento and David Cronenberg. Like these masters, Luca Guadagnino takes the remote so seriously that when you watch it you almost locate it in reality.
Paul Schrader doesn’t have it quite that far when he locates the remote in the present, he finds it in the dark antecedents of his broken heroes. The 76-year-old “Taxi Driver” author and director of classics such as “Mishima” is being honored with the Golden Lion for his life’s work this year. A bigger tribute might be a real lion for Master Gardener, but unfortunately the culmination of a trilogy about guilt and forgiveness is out of competition.
In it, actor Joel Edgerton plows through the precious landscape architecture of a southern estate as conscientiously as preachers and gamblers did their thing in the Schrader predecessor films “First Reformed” and “The Card Counter”. The estate’s patriarch, played by Sigourney Weaver, treats him like a hired footman – probably because she’s drawn to the disturbing tattoos on his torso. But whatever story the legacy of ink tells – it is only when he meets a young drug addict, his boss’s hated niece – that the facade crumbles.
Paul Schrader, this great man of letters among American film authors, succeeds in creating a darkly seductive alternative to “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” with “Master Gardener”. And he ensures that quality standards for the future remain high.
