One would not dare suggest that the three big autumn film festivals — Telluride, Toronto and Venice — think of themselves as being in competition, but, if they were to reclass the last decade or so as a sporting event, then Venice would almost certainly be winning. Whether one likes it or not, the industry regards the trifecta as kicking off the long, long awards season and, in recent years, the Venice competition has launched a staggering number of Oscar contenders. The Shape of Water and Nomadland, both best picture winners, also won the Golden Lion, top prize at the Lido. Last year The Power of the Dog, favourite for best picture until the final week, unspooled beside such competition as The Lost Daughter, Spencer and Dune.
Never mind that vulgar statuette envy. Launched in 1933 (under local political arrangements that are best glossed over), Venice now competes with only Cannes for offering sound argument that, ongoing trials noted, cinema remains a vibrant art form.
The streamers are part of that conversation. Still shunned by Cannes, thanks to arguments over distribution regulations, Netflix arrives at the event with four features. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Bardo (or False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths), marks a return to the two-time Oscar winner’s Mexico for what is described as an “epic comedy” — of which there are not nearly enough. Romain Gavrais’s Athena is a tough French drama. Noah Baumbach’s White Noise, which opens the bash, stars Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig in the story of a professor of Hitler studies whose life spins off the rails following an “airborne toxic event”. Shot two years ago, Andrew Dominik’s Blonde, adapted from Joyce Carol Oates’s novel offering variations on Marilyn Monroe, has been mired in controversy following reports of disturbing scenes and the awarding of a prohibitive NC-17 certificate in the US (amazingly the only film to be so rated this year). Ana de Armas plays Marilyn. Adrien Brody is Arthur Miller.
Domestic observers will have all eyes focused on Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin. International coverage has made much of the fact that the film unites McDonagh with Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson for the first time since In Bruges. Few of the trade papers have, however, noted that it also brings the two members of D’Unbelievables — Jon Kenny and Pat Shortt — back for a rare appearance at a top European film festival. Barry Keoghan and Kerry Condon are also in the cast of a project that looks to be gesturing back towards McDonagh’s early theatre work. Farrell and Gleeson play two pals who fall out on a remote Irish island while the Civil War rumbles on the mainland.
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David Collins, veteran Irish producer, will be out of competition with a documentary on an Irish legend. Adrian Sibley’s The Ghost of Richard Harris studies an actor who, among other achievements, appeared in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Il Deserto Rosso, winner of the Golden Lion in 1964. Ed Guiney, co-founder of Dublin’s Element Pictures, vies for the top prize with that company’s The Eternal Daughter, a ghost story starring Tilda Swinton and directed by the admired English film-maker Joanna Hogg.
Winner of the trailer battle so far is surely Todd Field’s Tár. Cate Blanchett stars alongside Noémie Merlant and Nina Hoss as the conductor of a prominent German orchestra. The promos layer on Mahler by the hod-load while grand images of simmering rivals (one supposes) offer picturesque bookends to Ms Blanchett’s aggressive baton waving. Field has a had a perplexing career. In the millennial years he scored multiple Oscar nominations with In the Bedroom and Little Children. Numerous potential projects came and went. There was a proposed Mexican revolution film. He was attached to an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Jonathan Franzen’s Purity was on the table. But nothing landed until now. Expectations are high for Tár.
Other intriguing films in competition include Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All, Florian Zeller’s The Son and Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale.
Guadagnino follows up Call Me By Your Name and his horror remake Suspiria with a tantalising adaptation of the eponymous novel by Camille DeAngelis. It seems that Timothée Chalamet and Taylor Russell will be playing “cannibalistic lovers” in a film that dances across various genre demarcations. The director made only qualified efforts to dampen speculation in a recent interview with IndieWire. “I think Suspiria was aggressively provocative. I think this one is much more serene in its sense of self,” Guadagnino said. “My true hope is that the audience doesn’t reject the movie as a provocation because it deals with a taboo like cannibalism.” As if.
After great success with The Father — notably an Oscar win for Anthony Hopkins — Zeller continues that story with the tale of a young man who moves back home with his middle-aged dad. Hugh Jackman, who plays the older of the characters, has been deemed “overdue” for his own Academy Award and will surely see Venice as a launching pad. Hopkins reprises his role from the earlier film.
You can get Jackman at 9/2 for the best actor Oscar with a “major high-street bookmaker”. Significantly tighter, at an unenticing 2/1, is Brendan Fraser. Following illness and other personal traumas, the star of The Mummy fell off the radar a bit in the last decade, but it looks as if he will attract all sorts of attention in Aronofsky’s The Whale. He plays a 43-stone man trying to connect with his teenage daughter in an adaptation of Samuel D Hunter’s play. Sadie Sink from Stranger Things plays the young woman.
For all the buzz underscoring these awards-hungry titles, there may be more press attention around one eccentric-looking out-of-competition release. After popular success with Booksmart, Olivia Wilde — a former student of the Gaiety School of Acting, fact fans — chose the ambitious Don’t Worry Darling for her second film as director. The reliably terrific Florence Pugh and the hugely talented KiKi Layne star in a suburban drama that, if the trailer is any guide, bears some similarities to The Stepford Wives. Yeah, whatever. The cameras will really be clicking for leading man Harry Styles. Screams will echo the length of the Adriatic.
The 79th Venice International Film Festival runs from August 31st until September 10th
