VENICE FILM FESTIVAL: THE BAD AND THE GOOD

By Uli Schmetzer

www.uli-schmetzer.com




VENICE, September 11, 2010 -- Anyone who saw the 67th Venice Film Fest this year as synonymous with the fate of Italian politics and the escalating corruption of Italian society would have been justified.
This moral decline is no novelty as detailed in Italian director Mario Martone’s epic “We Believed” a three and a half hour marathon movie on Italy’s Reunification in the 19th Century, a painful birth process already injected with the negative ingredients of the modern Italian State: Political opportunism; the betrayal of parties and factions; North-South snobbery, class differences and celebrated heroes who turn out to be opportunists, traitors, anarchists, even dictators.
Then there was the award for the best film, the Golden Lion, handed over to the American director Sofia Coppola for her film ‘Somewhere,’ a story of the odysseys around hotels and cities of the daughter of a famous actor - obviously borrowed from Coppola’s childhood memories, traveling with her famous father, Francis Coppola. The Golden Lion award, a shock decision, was handed over by an emotional Quentin Tarantino, the American film mogul and president of the festival jury. He happens also to be the former fiancé of the premiered Ms Coppola.
Nothing has changed in Italy. Bluntness and criticism are still punished. The undeserving are still rewarded in a country where the Cultural Minister this week, visibly frothing at the mouth, announced film actor and director Michele Placido would not be given another dime of state funding. This happened after Placido was criticized that his film – ‘Vallanzasco - Angels of Evil’ had glorified the country’s two most notorious criminals. The peeved veteran actor snapped back that in modern Italy the most glorified criminals sit in parliament and the Vatican
Lamenting Italy’s declining level of culture the country’s most prominent film critic, Roberto Silvestri, writing in Il Manifesto, blamed the malaise on …..”a minister of culture who has not seen a film since Massenzio’s days (emperor Constantine’s days) and his deputy ministers who know only fiction TV by controlling its casting……”(a reference to reports that TV actresses and showgirls have to attend private parties by government officials to obtain roles).
Such Fellini-esque farces proved as suitable a backdrop to the festival as the efforts of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s government to change the constitution in order to safeguard the Prime Minister and his entourage from criminal prosecution.
For connoisseurs and the nostalgic the once charming film festival location on the Lido has been converted into a stagnant building site. Where once stood 70 venerable pine trees today a large crater gapes filled with muddy water. The hole was to be part of a new cinema complex. But its construction was suspended indefinitely when workers discovered toxic waste. Now a tug of war must decide who pays for the costly removal of the waste and who is guilty of scamming on the project. Six people are detained.
Then the three channels leading from the Venetian lagoon into the Adriatic Sea are being deepened to allow ever larger passenger liners to float through the delicate ecosystem of the city of Venice. The 10 billion Euro project launched by Berlusconi and his friends is supposed to have retractable barriers to safe Venice from flooding. But every year it resembles more like a construction or money laundering scam that will do more damage then good. No one has yet come up with a viable design for the retractable barriers – but the digging continues, allowing more rather then less water to enter the lagoon city at high tide.
In the middle of the furor over the festival building site architects of the project admitted the felling of the seventy old pine trees had not been part of their plan. The trees were supposed to remain. Of course no one knows who decided to deforest the site – in a single night and without warning.
As usual there were protests during the festival: By the police force against salary cuts and by a small crowd against nuclear energy.
But the show went on. Amid fences, abandoned building sites, protesting policemen, a muddy lake and without its lovely trees the 67th Film Fest did illustrate Venice is still the Mecca of innovative and alternative films that may never be shown anywhere else because they are not part of the American studio circuit that owns or dominates western cinema theaters.
And it also demonstrated, again, awards are rarely won by those who deserve them.
This year’s film makers displayed an unusual fascination with abstract and surrealistic productions that appear to cater for a minority of cinematic snobs and graduates of prestigious film schools who see in some of these tedious, soporific epics an enlightened form of art. These ‘arty’ films resemble an abstract painting in which every spectator finds a different meaning but everyone believes they have discovered the true essence of the opus. Unfortunately Ms Coppola’s ‘Somewhere’ cannot be classified even in that category.
Many of this year’s movies reflected a society in which morality has been sacrificed to mercenary interests, compassion to egocentricity, a society that spoils its children with indulgent parents who give them no guidelines on right and wrong. Perversity, fraud even prostitution are acceptable devices today in the pursuit of one’s personal ambitions, a pursuit conveniently defined as personal ‘happiness.’
One of the best of these exposes is the Italian Marco Bellochio’s “The Sisters Mai a tale of our times in which granddaughters and grandsons gradually whittle away the family patrimony in their selfish pursuits to realize their own harebrain schemes and dreams. Their elders became milking cows duped into signing loans and guarantees.
Another peek into our modern societies was the brilliant Turkish film ‘Cogunluk –Majority directed by the young Seren Yuce who illustrated how the well-to-do middle class perpetuates itself, educating its children in the brutal and uncouth ways of their elders who accumulated wealth by treating workers and servants with disdain and cruelty.
In fact Venice 67 did reflect a society preoccupied with the ‘self’ rather then the commune. The cinematic industry itself produced a score of introspect works (among them Coppola’s ‘Somewhere’ which seems to go nowhere.) Far more titillating is Carlo Mazzacurati’s funny ‘La Passione’ (the Passion) in which a confused scriptwriter is ordered to come up with an idea for a film in three days. Monte Hellman’s ‘The Road to Nowhere’ is a journey through a film-making industry trapped between fantasy and reality and possibly financed by fraud, tax evasion or money laundering. The question remains: Is the industry turning on itself, like bandits who run out of territory to ransack?
The main dish on the festival menu was the sagas of historic events chronicling the horrors perpetuated by human beings on other human beings.
The haunting September 11, 1973 military coup in Chile is portrayed by Chilean director Pablo Larrain in his gripping film “Post Mortem” through the eyes of a hermit clerk in the pathology department of Santiago de Chile. He is in love with a fired burlesque dancer whose family is staunchly pro-Allende. As the corpses pile up in the morgue the clerk (who transcribes the pathologist’s report) doggedly pursues his unrequited love story, virtually immune to the slaughter around him. The film was a favorite of the critics but won no mention in the awards.
In the Chinese film ‘The Ditch’ the morgue is located in Inner Mongolia’s Gobi Desert where Mao Tsetung’s Anti-Rightist and Hundred Flower campaigns in the late 1950s and early 1960s dispatched critics and dissidents for re-education keeping them in labor camps that became their tombs. Worked, starved and beaten to death millions were housed in underground caves, forced to scamper through the desert for food and finally, to survive, by eating parts of the dead.
Perhaps the Festival’s most haunting film, one that needs to be seen, is Denis Villeneuve’s ‘Incendies (Ashes)’ the riveting story of a mother and her three children in a Lebanon ravaged by civil war. Incendies, shot in haunting grey, illustrates the idiocy of fraternal war and how a country commits suicide; its story is a metaphor for brutality, inhumanity and ignorance in which neighbors, families, communities, ferociously exterminate or torture one another eked on by evil minds and the quest for power thinly disguised with religious motivation. Not only the destruction and inhumanity of this film is spine-chilling but the thriller plot as the children discover the horror of their mother’s life.
Julian Schnabel’s “Miral” deals once again with the unsolved problem of a dispossessed and occupied Palestine. It portrays the years around the first Intifadah in the late 1980s when mutual hatred had not reached intolerance or bloody reprisals yet and the Oslo accord was still a beacon of hope. For those of us who reported the conflict in those years the movie is a stark reminder that the failure to implement Oslo precipitated the sanguine sequence of the second Intifadah and the rise of Hamas and the hard-line parties in the Israeli Knesset. It is also a vivid reminder that people haunted from their homes and their land are unlikely to vanish quietly into history.
Not that this year’s Festival lacked an abundance of commercial movies, those appealing to more base instincts with messages written in blood. In these Hollywood-style blockbusters the emphasis today is heavily on actresses who appear to be the products of the wet dreams of middle-aged men - petite post-teenage creatures, perfectly proportioned and without excess extremities, angelic and plastic faced all build, it appears, on a Ford-like assembly lines. Any message for a more just and more tolerant world (the come-on to win cinematic prizes) are cloaked in endless bloodlettings with heads literally rolling off the screen and blood spurting geyser-like from decapitated torsos, perforated throats or burst lungs.
There was a time, not long ago, when humane ideas were transmitted more subtly and with less red liquid. But in ‘Machete’ (dir. Robert Rodriguez/Ethan Maniquis) machete-wielding Danny Trejo, who looks like Frankenstein, produces rivers of blood to get across his message that societies cannot victimize immigrants forever (in this case Mexicans) because eventually the victims will organize themselves, find a super-hero like Machete to lead them and strike back at those who exploit, persecute and kill them.
The dilemma of alternative or low budget movie makers today is how to be successful at the box office without completely conforming to the accepted standards of a happy ending ala Hollywood and a promotional message about the American dream which offers capitalism as the only true path to happiness. The ‘Happy Poet,’ was a sensitive low budget cinematic jewel until the writer, actor and director, Paul Gordon, decided to adopt the Hollywood recipe at the ending. Gordon then had the gumption to apologize at the premier for the ‘upbeat’ ending. Give us a break, Paul: Why couldn’t you admit the friends who screwed you when you ran a vegetarian-food stand in the park also screwed you when they decided to exploit your idea with investor funding? Do you really think they would have made you an equal partner? This only happens in Hollywood movies. Viva America!
Ingenuity can be a double-edged sword but French movies these days are celebrating a vibrant renaissance that makes them run ahead of the rest. The French have something to say. Perhaps they always did.
No film was more ingenious then Bertrand Blier’s ‘Le Bruit des Glacons (The Ice Cubes) an alcoholic writers humorous dialogue with his personified cancer who visits him as a guest then becomes a permanent companion. In the end the initially not unpleasant cancer becomes a scourge and with this metamorphosis comes the desire to beat the painful guest at his own game.
The French trotted out their formidable cinematic duet Catherine Deneuve and Gerard Depardieu to retrieve from the closet the 1970s theme of female emancipation in Francois Ozon’s ‘Potiche’ in which a domesticated ‘trophy housewife’ takes over the company from her chauvinist husband. Merit where merit is due, the French have the knack to make romance, sex and love look so blasé, so normal. The rest of the film industry ties itself into Gordian knots to make them look abnormal.
Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, the riveting story of two ballerinas vying to be awarded the role of ‘Queen of the Swans,” is a parody on good and evil and the extent to which athletes and performers will go to gain a coveted role or a victory.
Israeli director Eitan Zur’s “Naomi” is a well done modern Blue Angel (though without a Marlene Dietrich). An elderly professor married to a young woman and inevitably raked by jealousy.
In the Bosnian film Circus Colombia director Danis Tanovic shows us the banality of war with the sweet-sour story of one family drawn into choices they did not want to make.
The Silver Lion at Venice 67 went to Spanish director Alex de la Iglesia for his abstract “Ballad of a Sad Trumpet” in which two disfigured clowns fight to the death for an acrobat during Franco’s fascist regime.


Uli Schmetzer is author of ‘Times of Terror’ and ‘Gaza’ (both available on www.Amazon.com) He has covered the Venice Film Festival for the last ten years.