As Venice International Film Festival eases towards the awards ceremony on Saturday night, attendees are thanking the lagoon gods they remain upright. This was the hottest Venice in some years, and not just because the likes of Angelina Jolie, George Clooney and Nicole Kidman were back on the red carpet after last year’s Hollywood actors’ strike. With temperatures in the 30s, festival programmes were being used more often as fans than as schedules. Even the hard-bitten Venetian who sold me beer most nights made “Pfft!” noises as she prayed for a break.
“And the films were as steamy as the weather!” As if The Irish Times would sink so low. You couldn’t sincerely make that argument, but there was a fair smattering of sex about the place. Kidman won raves for her performance as a high-level executive copping off with a young intern (the unstoppable Harris Dickinson) in Halina Reijn’s intense, slyly comic Babygirl. In truth, the core scenario is not a new one. A couple throw themselves into a hugely intense sexual relationship, decorated with a filigree of kink, that threatens to destroy lives. Last Tango in Paris wasn’t the first or last to run through those possibilities. But Reijn, Dutch director of the subversive comedy Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, has found a slyly satirical register that opens up unexplored possibilities. Kidman’s inner struggle to resist unorthodox temptations is a wonder to behold.
Compare that with the weirdly tepid Queer. The notion of Luca Guadagnino casting Daniel Craig as a version of William S Burroughs in an adaptation of an early novel by that radical author set attendees in an anticipatory whirl. The film, alas, turned out to be rare dud from the director of Challengers and Call Me by Your Name. William Lee, Burrough’s alter ego, is adrift in Mexico City during the postwar years. The drama follows his sexual relationship with a young American (Drew Starkey) as they bounce about decadent expats and, eventually, embark on a trip to the South American jungle.
The sex scenes, though mildly explicit, settle for a tastefulness that would surely irritate Burroughs. The drug trips employ off-the-peg psychedelia of the drabbest hue. Worst of all, the film, particularly in its opening hour, is so darn dull. There is only so much time one can happily spend watching sweaty Americans smoke cigs in Mexican bars.
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Much of the red-carpet chatter revolved around the presence of both Brad Pitt and Jolie, currently engaged in an acrimonious split, arriving at the same edition of the festival. Awkward! As things worked out, the festival put a discreet gap between the premiere of Pablo Larraín’s Maria, starring Jolie as Maria Callas, and Jon Watts’s Wolfs, featuring Pitt and Clooney as underground fixers. Pitt made a rare public appearance with his new girlfriend, Ines de Ramon. Jolie was sleeveless in brown Saint Laurent.
Wolfs turned out to be pretty much what you’d expect from an Apple TV release following two sleek wise guys as they seek to cover up an accidental death in New York City. It passes the time without troubling the memory banks.
Maria was something else. Following on from Larrain’s Jackie, about Jackie Kennedy, and his Spencer, about Princess Diana, the third film in an apparent trilogy catches Callas, the 20th century’s most celebrated opera diva, as she declines among loyal servants. I found the film to be at least the equal of its predecessors, with Jolie (who understands the pressures of fame) bringing an epic sadness to the flinty, depleted singer. There were more dissenters among critics than I would have expected, but the star seems certain to be a presence at the incoming awards season.
It hurts to even mention such an absurdity, but in recent years the festival press has become increasingly obsessed with the length of standing ovations. For the record, at time of writing, nobody has beaten the 17 minutes of palm-hammering the Sala Grande handed out for Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton after the premiere of Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door. The 74-year-old Spaniard’s first feature in English sees him on fine, if not exceptional, form.
Moore plays a writer conflicted when an old friend, a war reporter with advanced cancer, asks assistance in accelerating her demise. The piece starts slowly but gains quiet, philosophical intensity as the two retire to the country and prepare for the administration of a lethal drug. You know what the film looks like. The director has brought his taste for poster-paint red and fabulous knitwear to an American setting. The formal elegance does not, however, distract from a knotty conversation about the morality of assisted dying. Moore and Swinton, who suit the Almodóvar aesthetic perfectly, were always likely to excite a Venice crowd.
The Australian director Justin Kurzel is carving out a reputation, with films such as Nitram and True History of the Kelly Gang, for mastering tales of young men led into radical violence. The Order, featuring big performances by Jude Law and Nicholas Hoult, might just be his most grimly entertaining film yet. Law plays an FBI agent who, after being dispatched to the US Pacific Northwest in the early 1980s, becomes obsessed with a cabal of white-supremacist terrorists mobilising nearby. Hoult plays the real-life neo-Nazi organiser Bob Matthews.
No doubt reviews will talk up how “relevant” the film is to the contemporary United States, and the closing titles do, indeed, reference the January 6th disturbances. Setting that hook aside, The Order bristles with jagged-edge action that never slips into lazy tropes. Alison Oliver, the talented Cork actor from Conversations With Friends and Saltburn, has a strong supporting role as Matthews’s conflicted wife.
Venice also offered a host of documentaries. There were two misfires with Michael Lurie and Eric Friedler’s Darkness into Light and Asif Kapadia’s 2073.
The former did us the service of presenting newly discovered footage from Jerry Lewis’s The Day the Clown Cried, a notorious unfinished feature starring the comic as a clown in Auschwitz, but did so within a clunky film that had trouble making a coherent narrative.
Kapadia’s film is the most peculiar of beasts. A framing device posits a dystopia in which Samantha Morton plays a member of the underclass forced to live in squalor while, following an unspecified disaster, the superrich continue their life of ease. Her repetitive adventures play out between flashbacks that unrelentingly list the discontents of our age: climate change, tech-bro fascism, state surveillance, the shrinking of democracy. There’s nothing much to argue with here, but nor is there much of a thesis. It’s just a catalogue of current doom and doom to come.
Better was Errol Morris’s Separated, a study of the bureaucratic dishonesty around Donald Trump’s policy of separating children from the family of undocumented migrants at the United States’ southern border.
But the surprise here was Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards’s funny, loud, occasionally upsetting One to One: John & Yoko. You could be forgiven for rolling eyes at another doc about the most exhausting Beatle, but this study of John and Yoko in 1972 – also a pondering of the year itself in US popular culture – maintains, in its canny editing, an awareness of Lennon’s occasional pomposity. He enjoys a tad of redemption at the end. Yoko remains the hero. The music properly blares.
To many people’s surprise, Todd Phillips’s Joker: Folie à Deux, sequel to the Golden Lion-winning Joker, played weirdly late in the festival, arriving after this writer boated from the Lido. A handful of other tipped releases were still to screen.
It is, however, going to take a premiere of some power to overshadow the impact of Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist on the opening Saturday. Corbet’s first two films, The Childhood of a Leader and Vox Lux, divided critics (I was an unqualified enthusiast), but his new epic, 3½ hours of luscious 70mm VistaVision, lived up to buzzy advance word. Adrien Brody plays László Toth, a Hungarian architect driven at the end of the second World War to the United States, where he eventually acquires Guy Pearce’s self-important oligarch as a patron. Over the succeeding 15 years they fall out and make up again as Toth plots an enormous cultural edifice in Pennsylvania for this latter-day Caesar.
There are obvious echoes of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead here, but Corbet could scarcely be more distinct in his political conclusions. The film is strong on the hostility that the United States, an immigrant country, had, by then, developed for any foreign influence. It is mutteringly disgusted at the corrupting influence of extreme wealth. What really sets the film aside is its mastery of effect. Daniel Blumberg’s score, influenced by the work Scott Walker did on Corbet’s first two films, blares discordantly as vehicles blast down highways towards an implied manifest destiny that benefits only a few. It is a luscious, sprawling beast – shot for the price of an intimate indie – that immediately became the buzziest release of 2024 and deserved favourite for the Golden Lion (which means it will almost certainly lose).
