In Contention

Tag: Giuseppe Capotondi

  • INTERVIEW: ‘The Double Hour’ director Giuseppe Capotondi

    With this year’s Cannes circus just a week away, now is as good a time as any to point out the strangely hobbled journey taken by so many festival films to our cinema screens. For all the concentrated media attention and occasional trophies lavished upon arthouse titles at Cannes, Sundance and the like, the festival itself is little more than a starting block in a long race for distribution — and “The Double Hour,” a wickedly splintered Italian thriller currently on limited release in the US, has been running it for a while.

    The debut feature of Giuseppe Capotondi, a director hitherto acclaimed for his commercial and music-video work, “The Double Hour” was one of the under-the-radar hits of the 2009 Venice Film Festival — the only title amid a lackluster slate of homegrown features to capture critics’ imaginations, it surprised many by landing the Best Actress award for striking Russian lead Ksenia Rappoport. Despite this success, it’s taken 18 months to reach American arthouses; in the UK, it still hovers in distribution limbo.

    The wait should have been shorter, not least because Capotondi’s film is anything but obscure in sensibility: a sharp, sexy hybrid genre piece generously bookmarked with cinematic references, it touches on heist thriller, psychological horror and romantic drama, all with equal panache.

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  • VENICE: ‘Soul Kitchen,’ ‘The Double Hour’

    Soul KitchenHappily, the bug that kept me down yesterday seems to have flown on the wings of Nurofen and a night’s sleep, so I’m ready to face the Lido madness again.  As if sympathetic to my state, the Competition served up two relatively untaxing titles.

    Festival director Marco Müller made it clear that he was experimenting with a more mainstream-friendly approach in this year’s Venice programme — hence the inclusion of “Bad Lieutenant” and “Survival of the Dead,” among others, in the lineup — so the overt genre leanings of Italian psycho-thriller “The Double Hour” came as no surprise, particularly given its hometown advantage. Far less expected was that heavyweight German-Turkish auteur Fatih Akin would arrive with the fluffiest Competition entry to date.

    This afternoon brings a second “surprise film” in the Competition (here’s hoping it’s a more pleasant surprise than “My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?”), as well as Jaco van Dormael’s “Mr. Nobody.” As eagerly as I’m awaiting the latter, I might have to postpone it to tomorrow, as a producer friend of mine unveils a short film next door. Onto this morning’s films …

    “Soul Kitchen” (**)

    Fatih Akin’s candyfloss-light character comedy will come as a major shock to those familiar with the 36 year-old director via his solemn arthouse works “Head-On” and “The Edge of Heaven.”

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