VENICE: ‘Black Venus,’ ’13 Assassins,’ ‘Attenberg,’ ‘A Sad Trumpet Ballad’

On my way to Tom Tykwer’s latest, so no time for an intro. Further rounding up highlights (and lowlights) of the Venice competition lineup:

Expectations were appreciably high, and the press screening queue consequently doubled back on itself, for Abdellatif Kechiche’s historical drama “Black Venus” (**1/2) – after all, Kechiche had a hit on the Lido three years ago with the excellent “The Secret of the Grain,” and for those who know it, the story he’s working with here seemed overdue for screen treatment. By the time the credits rolled on this hard, dense, 165-minute slap of a movie, however, applause was more scattered than one might have expected for a display of such voluminous craft and ambition; the silence, one suspects, was that of an audience assessing which lines had and hadn’t been crossed.

For my part, I remain stuck in a halfway house between immense appreciation that Kechiche has brought the extraordinary story of Saartjie Baartman, the black South African maid whose unusual physique (and genitalia) briefly made her the toast of the European vaudeville circuit in the 19^th century, to the screen; and regret that he’s chosen to tell it in such a way that the film becomes complicit in the objectification it claims to decry.

Intelligently inhabited by well-cast newcomer Yahima Torres, Saartjie is nonetheless presented less as a freestanding character than as a put-upon symbol of racial oppression and alienation. The remote nature of the characterization rather bravely underlines her otherness, but this is scrutiny without empathy: Kechiche’s gaze is effective in reflecting that of an entire society, but leaves us waiting for a shift in perspective that never arrives.

If these discomfiting issues of representation already make “Black Venus” an aggravating sit, matters are not in any way eased by the director’s punishingly methodical shooting and editing schemes: the film is mostly structured upon a series of highly formalized performances and procedures – from Saartjie’s own stage shows to lectures, court hearings, even transactions in the brothel where she winds up working – that Kechiche chooses to depict, in real time, from start to finish, several such sequences running to the 20-minute mark.

As such, he is a master of studying ceremony and ritual, but for all the wealth of detail, the rhythm is so unvaried – with many scenes pitched so shoutily high – that the film becomes counter-productively exhausting: it has little left to reveal past the halfway point. Alternately upsetting and enervating, then, “Black Venus” is both a showcase for Kechiche’s prodigious gifts as a metteur-en-scene and a thorough history lesson that hits duly hard – but doesn’t understand that one knockout punch tends to be enough.

More brutal only in terms of actual bloodshed than “Black Venus,” but one hell of a lot more fun, Takashi Miike’s “13 Assassins” (***1/2) turned out to be one of the most unexpected joys of the Competition lineup: a straight-up, even classical, samurai spectacular that trades in bone-dry humor without placing itself entirely in genre-film quote marks. “You think the age of war was like this?” marvels one wide-eyed warrior, surveying the corpses left by a particularly vigorous round of ketchup-colored carnage. “It’s magnificent!”

That tone of slightly acid-tinged wonderment is consistent throughout this lavishly violent film, which charts a narrative course both highly convoluted and frankly incidental: the vast network of characters seems to keep procreating at a roughly equal pace to the body count, though it essentially boils down to two teams of good and evil, charismatically led by actors Koji Yakusho and Masachika Ichimura, respectively. (The film’s true star turn, however, comes from Takayuki Yamada, priceless as a peasant lad who joins the good guys despite his unmasked disdain for samurai culture.)

The film takes some time to warm up, as Miike faithfully but somewhat lethargically lays out the political groundwork in traditional samurai-film code. Once we get outdoors and the games begin, however, with all involved parties duking it out in an enclosed death-trap village – a production designer’s triumph, equal parts heritage site and video-game maze – the pace is relentless, the laughs hearty, the combat dazzling. By the time a herd of flaming bulls comes tearing through the wreckage, you’re inclined to agree with the aforementioned samurai: it may not be the age of war, but it is rather magnificent indeed.

“‘Dogtooth’ lite,” I twittered yesterday about Greek-American helmer Athina Rachel Tsangari’s striking sophomore feature “Attenberg” (***), and while that sounds like a bit of a dismissal, it isn’t really meant as one. The relationship between Tsangari’s film and Yorgos Lanthimos’s recent arthouse darling does deeper than their shared Hellenic heritage: Tsangari is a regular Lanthimos collaborator, having produced “Dogtooth” (he returns the favour by playing a supporting role here), so the films’ commonalities – the prevalent tone of deadpan absurdism, the eerie sexual awkwardness, even some dance moves — feel shared rather than aped.

In many respects, “Attenberg” reads as the more feminine, more permeable flipside to Lanthimos’s film (I’d say “warmer,” but it’s still impressively chilly), also tracing a young person’s stunted sexual and emotional development but with a more guardedly hopeful outlook. Our heroine is Marina (Ariane Labed, very strong), a 23 year-old virgin whose sole coming-of-age advice has come from her best friend Bella and her beloved David Attenborough wildlife documentaries; when, for the first time, she find herself pursued by a man, at the same time as her doting single father decides he is dying, she slowly begins mapping out the next stage of her life.

That description reads more conventional than Tsangari’s brooding silent-alarm treatment; her symbolism is on the bitty side, but the emotional clarity and morbid comedy she balances here mark her as a name to watch.

I’d like to say something similarly charitable about the extravagant eccentricity on display in Spanish director Alex de la Iglesias’s batty psycho-clown melodrama “A Sad Trumpet Ballad” (1/2*), but any good will I might have mustered for originality of vision was bludgeoned away early on by the ear-splitting chaos of the execution. I was, admittedly, not well-placed to enjoy de la Iglesias’s ham-fistedly stylized saga of rival clown duelling for the affections of a showgirl (played by the splendidly named Christina Bang) – clowns bring me out in hives at the best of times – but this scarcely coherent fiasco, a crude allegory for Franco’s Spain, is most emphatically not the best of times: the film features a scattered mosaic of silent-film references, touching on James Whale and Tod Browning, but its nightmarish sound mix makes a far stronger case for the merits of pre-talkie cinema.

[Photo: Filmlinc.com]