In Contention

Author: Guy Lodge

  • VENICE: ‘Potiche,’ ‘A Letter to Elia,’ ‘Robinson in Ruins’

    Hey, did you miss me yesterday? Don’t answer that. Sorry for the radio silence, but Saturday proved to be both my busiest and most rewarding day at Venice, serving up five films — none of them stinkers, and one of them perhaps my favourite of the fest so far.

    After capping the day’s viewing with a delightful pasta dinner in the company of two of Variety’s finest, I took the water-bus back to my San Marco hotel room in a pleasant fog of good feeling and red wine, only to find the wi-fi in my hotel room had taken the night off.

    As it turned out, it was just as well: today’s festival schedule being a lean and mostly unappetizing one, I rewarded myself with my first lie-in of the week (sorry, Tsui Hark) and began afresh in the morning. Late-night reviewing is fraught with hazard, anyway, as I’d learned the night before when I nodded off in the middle of writing up “The Sleeping Beauty.” (Before you say, “How apt,” let me remind you that there is no beauty in waking up at 5 a.m. with keyboard-face.)

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  • SHORT TAKE: “Meek’s Cutoff” (****)

    Venice Film Festival

    “But nothing happens,” complained several friends to whom I had (perhaps a little too zealously) recommended Kelly Reichardt’s previous feature “Wendy and Lucy,” her pocket masterpiece about the mental unravelling of a stalled drifter in the great American nowhere.

    It’s hard to say whether such viewers will be appeased or even further dismayed by Reichardt’s subtly muscular and altogether staggering follow-up, “Meek’s Cutoff,” which sees the director taking on a propulsively linear narrative – an ox-wagon road movie driven by the most fundamental of human needs – that nonetheless still finds its greatest dramatic significance in minute human exchanges. This is a film whose story turns on one character’s offer to repair another’s shoe, the implications of this small act weighted so as to hold you in hushed fascination through every stitch.

    If, then, Reichardt remains an astute chronicler of what happens when nothing happens, “Meek’s Cutoff” affords the director her largest canvas yet on which to ruminate. A 19th century-set Western covering the most severe and spectacular stretches of the Oregon Trail to transfixingly beautiful effect, the film expands its focus from the selective character studies of “Old Joy” and “Wendy and Lucy” to ponder the fates of three families and two bookended individuals, miles from a home that does not yet exist.

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  • VENICE: ‘The Sleeping Beauty,’ ‘Silent Souls’

    Blame Sofia Coppola. Or at least blame Los Angeles. For immediately after the former’s summery, sun-bleached “Somewhere” kicked off this morning’s activity, the Lido clearly decided to rebel against Coppola’s aesthetic and started gathering its clouds. Shortly before noon, the beachfront was a mere blur under a torrential downpour of rain, robust sponsors’ umbrellas blown heedlessly across the red carpet.

    The storm ended as abruptly as it began, though I couldn’t help wondering if it was an instruction of sorts from the festival gods. “Okay, dilettantes, you’ve had the three name American auteurs,” they seemed to be saying. “Now feel free to hop on over to Telluride or Toronto; you won’t even be missing out on the weather.”

    I was indoors when the gusts began whipping against the windows of the press room, but was affected by the storm nonetheless: largely because a leak in the ceiling necessitated the shutdown of the room’s wi-fi network for over two hours, handily erasing half the “Somewhere” review I’d already written and throwing my day’s screening schedule out of whack. Venice’s slightly bumpy administration can be endearing sometimes; this was not one of those times.

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  • REVIEW: “Somewhere” (***1/2)

    Venice Film Festival

    Who’d be Sofia Coppola? (As an artist, I mean – I’m sure plenty of women would gladly trade for her beauty, wardrobe and Parisian rock-star husband.) No sooner had her bijou, highly personal breakthrough picture netted her an Oscar, atop countless critical valentines, than an acidic chorus of detractors began chiding her for aiming too low. When she shot for postmodern history and swirling visual excess in her strong follow-up, “Marie Antoinette,” the same people gleefully decided she was reaching too high this time.

    So when the pitch surfaced for her fourth feature film, it seemed that Coppola may have been cowed into submission by her critics: another story of a disaffected Hollywood actor adrift in hotel world, its apparent similarities to “Lost in Translation” could scarcely pass without comment. Was Coppola playing it safe, or worse, exposing a limited creative arsenal?

    The answer to both questions, happily, is no. With the wry, shimmery and thoroughly beguiling “Somewhere,” Coppola has perhaps made exactly the film she needed to at this point in her career: one that calmly takes stock of her abilities and interests rather than pushing them too severely.

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  • VENICE: ‘Reign of Assassins,’ ‘Happy Few’

    “How many films did you see today?” It’s an innocent-sounding question that you nonetheless feel oddly cautious answering at a festival. Did I see too few? Do they think me a lightweight? Should I squeeze in a midnight screening of that Iranian peasant musical I really have no interest in seeing, just to beef up my score?

    Okay, it’s not as petty and competitive as all that. (And it goes without saying that I’d be totally up for an Iranian peasant musical.) But whereas watching three films at home on a regular day feels like something of an indulgence, at a festival it seems positively neglectful, unappreciative of the spread that has been laid out for you.

    “What am I missing?” you keep asking yourself (and others willing to listen). Then again, a friend of mine who sticks religiously to a six-film-a-day diet at every festival likely asks himself the same thing. It’s best to stop counting.

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  • ‘Black Swan’ still the talk of the Lido

    Two days into the Venice Film Festival, and still the only film I consistently hear people talking about is “Black Swan” — even as the film accrues its share of detractors, it seems Venice fest director Marco Müller has broken the traditional curse of festival curtain-raisers, kicking off this year’s Lido activity with a film people actually give a damn about. (As Variety’s Justin Chang rather succinctly put it on Twitter: “In the battle of opening-night films: Venice 1, Cannes 0.”)

    Meanwhile, its kinship with Aronofsky’s previous feature, “The Wrestler,” has grown from an interesting side-note broken a few days ago into the most recurrent point of discussion around the film; Aronofsky addressed the matter directly in the film’s press conference yesterday, from which USA Today offers this quote:

    The more I looked into the world of ballet, I actually started to see all these similarities to the world of wrestling … They both have these performers that use their bodies in sort of extremely, intense physical ways. Their entire performance is based on intense physicality.

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  • SHORT TAKE: “Miral” (**)

    Venice Film Festival

    Coming as it does from a filmmaker whose previous work has bent over backwards to reclothe and perfume the unglamorous body of the prestige biopic, the opening beats of Julian Schnabel’s latest, “Miral,” couldn’t be more prosaic.

    For a good few minutes, the credit sequence offers the eye little more than a dawdling pan over a fuzzy map of the Israel-Palestine region, ennobling music thrumming away. (The blocky purple credits themselves are hideous, by the way, but that’s already the least of our problems.) Surprises aren’t exactly forthcoming when we the credits wrap and our geography lesson is complete: “My name is Miral,” intones Freida Pinto in a helpful introductory voiceover. “I was born in 1973, but my story really begins in 1947.”

    Except it doesn’t; another woman’s does, however, and it’s the first of several admissions of the film’s own uncertainty as to why it’s here in the first place. The first of Schnabel’s biopics to come with a moderate fictional sheen, it’s scripted by Rula Jebreal — an international political journalist who became conscientized during her teenage years at an embattled Jerusalem orphanage — from her openly autobiographical novel, though it loftily purports to be about three generations of Palestinian women working toward independence.

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  • VENICE: ‘Norwegian Wood,’ ‘The Black Sheep’

    Hey, did you get that I kinda liked “Black Swan?”

    I hope you did, because it’s really the only thing to write home (or, indeed, to you) about from my first official day at the Venice Film Festival – a day that looked better on paper than in practice, owing a little each to the films themselves, scheduling overlaps in the programme and my own neglect and/or incompetence. (I willingly sacrificed one screening slot to write my “Black Swan” review, but the next was less sensibly given over to a red-herring panic attack over a missing passport that, as it turned out, was merely out on an errand.)

    Having missed Robert Rodriguez’s “Machete” for the less stupid of those reasons, I attempted to catch up with it at its midnight show an hour ago, but after spending 30 minutes standing in a motionless queue for a screening that was already running significantly late, I concluded that while there are some films I’d be willing to go to bed at 3 a.m. for, one directed by Mr. Rodriguez doesn’t really fit that description, however much fun several critics say it is. Hey, I tried. (Here’s Anne Thompson’s enthusiastic take on it.)

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  • REVIEW: “Black Swan” (****)

    Venice Film Festival

    It’s the juvenilization of the term “fairy tale” that has led many people to associate them inextricably with happy endings. At their most literary, fairy tales can be moral and often very unhappy narratives of yearning, obsession and eventual redemption, even if it comes with rather a large sacrifice attached; Hans Christian Andersen specialized in compromised happy endings, notably in “The Little Mermaid” and “The Red Shoes,” that would have made Walt Disney wince.

    If you squint slightly at “Black Swan,” the boldly deranged and beautifully despairing new film from Darren Aronofsky, you can see that it is, when push comes to plié, a contemporary fairy tale of sorts: the story of a little girl, in the fierce grip of controlling adults, who wants nothing more than to dance, and learns that she must exchange part of herself for the opportunity.

    That much I can say without breaking the spell for those who have not seen it. For while “Black Swan” may reveal itself as a fairy tale, that’s only after it has successfully masqueraded as a taut, witty and wickedly kinky thriller that pulls off the tricky double-bluff of following precisely the narrative course one has mapped out for it, yet emerging as all the more surprising for that adherence.

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  • Buon giorno, Venezia

    When you step off the plane and the first faces you encounter — not yet out of the baggage claim, even — are those of a friendly, familiar PR team who immediately furnish you with a press release, it’s fair to say that you’re very much at a film festival, even if Venice hasn’t yet officially drawn the curtains on this year’s edition.

    At the moment, things are still at the assembly stage: I’m currently sitting in the wi-fi lounge of the festival center — a cavernous space of 30-foot ceilings, gold-mosaic marble walls and rippling red curtains that is surely the most incongruously grandiose room ever set aside for the Great Unshaven of film journalism — watching garrulous workmen argue about the placement of couches, while others disentangle the wires sprouting from a teetering tower of AV equipment.

    Tomorrow, by the time I roll into the first 9 a.m. screening of “Black Swan” — caffeine-wired and perhaps still pajama-clad — you’d never know they’d been there.

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  • 11 days in Venice

    In a few hours’ time, a shiny and sensibly priced orange plane will whisk me off to the city of water, romance and the most expensive fleapit hotels this side of, well, anywhere for my second consecutive dive into the Venice Film Festival. Truth be told, I’m not quite ready for it… a surfeit of pre-travel errands has meant I’m still leafing through the fest’s vast 62-page press screening schedule, still trying to cobble out some semblance of an itinerary.

    A neat, contained festival preview, therefore, wasn’t really on the cards: I tried to narrow things down to a “10 most anticipated” list, but I’m far too hungry for the entire buffet to limit myself to that.

    In its place, then, I offer an indication of what the festival is serving up on a day-by-day basis; not only will you get an idea of when, in the next fortnight, your own horse in this race will come to attention, but you can also see some of the cineaste’s Sophie’s choices that lie ahead of me.

    My scribbly Venice calendar after the cut.

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  • A very European ‘American’

    Amid the growing buzz for the films about to make the festival rounds over the next two weeks, it’s easy to forget that one rather high-end title is hitting theaters as soon as Wednesday.

    Anton Corbijn’s hitman drama “The American,” starring George Clooney, was once expected to be in the festival pack — certain rumours had it opening Venice at one point — but Focus Features took us off-guard, settling instead on a release date that pre-empts the festival rush.

    Naturally, this change of course prompted chatter that the film wasn’t awards fodder (not something it ever especially appeared to be) and that it was more of a commercial play. That, however, certainly isn’t the impression left by this extensive LA Times piece on the film, which emphasises the “European” nature of the film’s tone and pacing — a gentle way of saying that it lies on the slower, more oblique end of the spectrum.

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  • Rossellini to head Berlinale jury

    Funny, last year Berlin Film Festival organizers waited until November to make this announcement — I guess they thought that since the fall festival season begins this week, they may as well ride the buzz-wave a bit. Anyway, Isabella Rossellini has been tapped the preside over the jury at the festival’s 2011 edition in February, stepping into the half-eaten shoes of this year’s president, Werner Herzog:

    The Italian-American actress and director Isabella Rossellini will be the President of the Jury for the 61st Berlin International Film Festival (February 10-20, 2011).

    “It’s fantastic that Isabella Rossellini will be the President of the Berlinale Jury in 2011,” says the festival’s director Dieter Kosslick. “She is a multifaceted, creative film artist with extensive experience in European, American and international cinema.”

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  • Tyler Perry, Oscar nominee?

    One thing I like about David Poland as an awards analyst is that he often makes an effort to expand the tight circle of contenders by bringing little-buzzed names into the conversation. Needless to say, this kind of punditry can lead to a lot of dead ends, but every now and then he lands on a genuine sleeper — which is why this casual aside in his Friday box-office column caught my eye:

    Of the current 16 [Lionsgate] $20m domestic openers, 7 are Tyler Perry (which is why For Colored Girls… is a lock to end up in this year’s Oscar race come December)…

    In case it hasn’t been on your radar, he’s talking about “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf,” Perry’s filmization of Ntozake Shange’s landmark 1975 stage study of the African-American female experience. The play, a poetry-based piece taking on issues of abuse, rape, abortion and eventual empowerment, is pretty strong medicine; it’s difficult to imagine how it might work on film, and how it’ll mesh with Perry’s brash creative sensibility.

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  • First foreign Oscar submissions

    I was waiting for news of these to begin trickling in… in my memory, the flood of official submissions for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar usually begins earlier than August. Anyway, we’re there, so expect a lot more of these updates between now and October 1, the Academy’s formal (if not entirely inflexible) deadline for participating countries to enter their films.

    The first three confirmed entries come from Taiwan, Romania and Iraq — the latter two countries awaiting their first nominations in the category, while Taiwan seeks to return to the race for the first time since its sole win, with “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” a decade ago.

    The most high-profile of the three is Romania’s pick: Florin Serban’s debut feature “If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle,” was one of the few critically embraced Competition titles at February’s Berlin Film Festival, where it scooped the runner-up Silver Bear prize. As is my wont at festivals, it seems, I missed it both at Berlin and at Edinburgh, though I’ve heard glowing reports from colleagues of the film, a character study of a teenager, on the brink of release from a detention center, whose rehabilitation is disrupted when his neglectful mother re-enters his life.

    (More, including trailers for all three films, after the jump.)

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  • Hello, goodbye

    If any of you are wondering why we haven’t written anything about the tragic passing of anime director Satoshi Kon at the unripe age of 46, it’s because I’ve been struggling to think of something meaningful to say about a filmmaker I felt I was still getting to know. Truth be told, I’ve only seen two of the four features the man directed, one of them shamefully recently at that; I had long meant to catch up with 2006’s “Paprika,” but only got round to it last month, after the (wholly warranted, as it turns out) talk of “Inception” parallels began swirling.

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  • Deadline for Oscar docs looming

    As we enter the fall festival season with an Oscar prediction sheet still covered in question marks, there is at least one category where almost all the viable contenders have already been seen. I speak, of course, of Best Documentary Feature, a race already crowded with possibilities from earlier fests and the summer release calendar, and with a submission deadline less than a week away.

    Over at The Odds, Steve Pond informs us that filmmakers have until September 1 to enter their docs for Oscar consideration, having completed qualifying theatrical runs (one week minimum) in the past 12 months. Sifting through the titles in play, Pond likes the chances of such heavily-buzzed titles as “Restrepo,” “Inside Job” and “A Film Unfinished.”

    All three films take on weighty subjects — respectively, the conflict in Afghanistan, the global economic crisis and (a well-known pet theme of the Academy) the Holocaust — which should stand them in good stead with a voting branch not renowned for its sense of humor.

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  • Back to Monday for Oscar?

    Some of our younger readers may think of the Academy Awards as a weekend-capping tradition, having taken place on a Sunday for the last 12 years running. However, seasoned Oscar-watchers will remember the days when, rather than rounding out the week, the ceremony kicked it off, falling on Monday so as not to interfere with the weekend box-office.

    Now, Variety reports that we may be returning to a Monday night Oscarcast, this time to scoot out the way of the NFL:

    The league’s players and owners are negotiating a new Collective Bargaining Agreement that will add two games to the regular season — a decision that could theoretically land Hollywood’s biggest event and the Super Bowl on the same day. The move from 16 to 18 games, according to sources, is a fait accompli and will go into effect for the 2012-13 season.

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