{"id":17118,"date":"2021-09-14T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-09-14T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=17118"},"modified":"2024-03-02T21:14:07","modified_gmt":"2024-03-03T05:14:07","slug":"marshall-shaffers-venice-film-festival-2021-diary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/marshall-shaffers-venice-film-festival-2021-diary\/","title":{"rendered":"Marshall Shaffer’s Venice Film Festival 2021 Diary"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u201cThe mere use of one\u2019s eyes in Venice is happiness enough,\u201d observed Henry James in the eighteenth century, \u201cand generous observers find it hard to keep an account of their profits in this line.\u201d He was writing about the Italian locale, of course, but he might as well be talking about the 2021 edition of the city\u2019s film festival.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Venice Film Festival never shuttered in the COVID-19 era, as they reminded attendees through a hagiographic \u201cpre-opening\u201d documentary lauding themselves for their courageous decision in 2020, and still was not entirely back to normal. Every other seat remained vacant for social distancing, and ushers patrolled wearing face coverings indoors with gusto normally reserved for piracy protection. Even so, masks don\u2019t block the most important part of the face for taking in cinema \u2013 the eyes and ears, both of which received stimulation by a cornucopia of masters new and old. After a muted 2020 where festivals dealt with slim pickings as filmmakers waited out the uncertainty of the pandemic, 2021 proved an embarrassment of riches.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bong Joon-ho\u2019s jury ultimately selected French director Audrey Diwan\u2019s abortion procedural Happening<\/em><\/strong> (L\u2019\u00c9v\u00e9nement)<\/em> for the Golden Lion, Venice\u2019s top prize. On paper, it\u2019s hard to quibble with giving the highest award to a filmmaker\u2019s sophomore feature amidst a sea of global cinema giants. (And given Venice\u2019s long-running issues with coming anywhere near gender parity in their competition slate, a second straight Golden Lion to a female director sends a powerful message.) Yet in practice, I found it difficult to generate the same enthusiasm for Diwan\u2019s film as the jury or other critics I spoke to in Venice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Film festivals are always a bit of a hermetic bubble until they aren\u2019t. Amidst intra-screening Twitter breaks over espresso or Aperol spritzes, the news finds a way to break through. Though few Americans make the journey to Venice, the Supreme Court\u2019s decision to imperil abortion access managed to cut through the noise and weigh heavily over screenings of Happening<\/em> that began just a few days later. Still, context cannot absolve or overpower content \u2013 think of all the much-lauded #Resistance art of the last four years that now looks vastly overrated in retrospect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Happening<\/em> unfolds in 1963 France as Anne (Anamaria Vartolomei) tries to terminate an unintended pregnancy in a country where the practice of abortion is illegal. Diwan is piercing and straightforward as she methodically lays out how backward social attitudes imperil Anne\u2019s life. I\u2019d struggle to name anything notably bad about the film. But I\u2019d also flounder a bit when trying to name anything Diwan does that\u2019s particularly noteworthy, either. Abortion is not such a taboo topic in the cinema that simply broaching the subject matter constitutes an act of cinematic courage, even as these stories continue to prove sadly necessary to tell. Happening<\/em> is a searing yet ultimately serviceable take on the subject matter that lacks a vision comparable to the brutal remove of 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days<\/em> or the poetic subjectivity of Never Rarely Sometimes Always<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If ever there were a film for that film festival bubble, however, it would be Mariano Cohn and Gast\u00f3n Duprat\u2019s Official Competition<\/em><\/strong>. The film kicks off with a wealthy business mogul\u2019s deadpan line delivery, suggesting that he build a bridge with his name on it to commemorate his legacy at 80 years old \u2026 or just fund a movie. (As I was told at my first film festival, the way to become a millionaire in the independent film world is to already be a billionaire and spend $999 million funding projects.) The observation instantly drew belly-laughs of recognition from a packed Venice crowd who ate up this wry comedy about putting this vanity project together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Think of a Christopher Guest-style drollness, but where fully-fleshed characters engage in actions with real consequences, and you\u2019d have something of the feel of Official Competition<\/em>. Cohn and Duprat focus on an unholy trinity of creatives assembled for the film \u2013 Pen\u00e9lope Cruz\u2019s wigged-out (literally and figuratively) eccentric director Lola, Antonio Banderas\u2019 self-obsessed star F\u00e9lix, and Oscar Mart\u00ednez\u2019s smugly studied actor Iv\u00e1n \u2013 in a series of increasingly odd preparatory exercises for production that double as showstopping comedic set pieces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Official Competition<\/em> mercifully avoids being nothing more than \u201cinside baseball\u201d for people connected to the world of film, even as it does indulge in a few moments that are pure catnip for festival crowds. Venice, or any audience full of people in the know, is the perfect environment to experience the film. Others that cannot feed off the energy of a rapturous crowd may find themselves asking earlier what only dawned on me in the film\u2019s closing minutes: what was this all for?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Overall, though, this year\u2019s Venice Film Festival was far from a navel-gazing affair. And even those filmmakers who looked inward \u2013 Pedro Almod\u00f3var, Pablo Larra\u00edn, Paolo Sorrentino, St\u00e9phane Briz\u00e9 \u2013 did so in a way that interrogated or evolved their well-established aesthetics and fascinations. The pandemic may have played a role here, either extending post-production for those who shot before the virus wreaked havoc on the world or giving filmmakers who braved new production regulations greater space for introspection in conceiving the work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That also applies to Ana Lily Amirpour, director of competition title Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon<\/em><\/strong>. With A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night<\/em> and The Bad Batch<\/em>, the filmmaker seemed to have shot her look-book rather than the script. In her third feature, she finds ways to merge her \u201cjust vibes\u201d house style with more traditional storytelling. She\u2019s found a way to marry the mythical tale of Jeon Jong-seo\u2019s telekinetic Mona with the mundane setting of a nasty New Orleans. Rather than disappearing into her vibrant fantasy world, Amirpour remains tethered to reality through one \u201cnormal\u201d character, Craig Robinson\u2019s Officer Harold. A figure who could come off as a lazy device provides the film with a real beating heart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No one made a bigger jump in my estimation, however, than director Valentyn Vasyanovych with the sparse and sublime Reflection<\/em><\/strong>. This tender drama wrings deep feeling from the journey of Ukrainian surgeon Serhiy (Roman Lutskyi) after he gets a front-row seat to the atrocities committed by Russian soldiers upon invading his country in 2014 \u2026 and then must re-emerge into the world he once knew trying to resume normalcy. It\u2019s a profoundly moving meditation on learning how to move forward with life after having seen it debased so thoroughly, one highly specific to the country\u2019s conditions but with feelings generalizable to anyone who feels like they\u2019ve seen hell in the last 18 months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vasyanovych\u2019s precise eye for submerged sensation recalls the way Ebert once described the aesthetics of Robert Bresson: \u201cso cold on its surface that I finally realized no man could make such distant and austere films without being, in fact, filled with unlimited passion.\u201d There\u2019s one meticulously designed long shot that made my heart skip several beats with its startling jolt of humanity during an extended take of truly bleak circumstances. The quiet dignity and deliberation of Reflection<\/em> so affected me that I walked out wondering if I had entirely misjudged the director\u2019s previous film, Atlantis<\/em>, as a work of misplaced miserabilism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reflection<\/em> was the film I was most inclined to skip from the lineup\u2019s announcement based on my previous knowledge of the filmmaker, and it wound up being my biggest surprise of the festival. Friends I met for dinner afterward noted that I could not stop waxing rhapsodic about the film over the meal. Much of it was Vasyanovych\u2019s work that stirred me, to be clear, but it was just nice to rekindle that sense of discovery and revelation once more at a film festival \u2013 and to pass that spark of inspiration onto others as the filmmaker had passed it along to me through his work. \"\"\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our first dispatch from the Venice Film Festival, with looks at the Golden Lion-winning \u201cHappening,\u201d the winking satire \u201cOfficial Competition,\u201d Ana Lily Amirpour\u2019s \u201cMona Lisa and the Blood Moon,\u201d and the sublime \u201cReflection.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":522,"featured_media":17120,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1416],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-festivals"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/522"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17118"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17118\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22188,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17118\/revisions\/22188"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}