The Film Experience

Please welcome guest contributor Elisa Giudici. She saw all the Venice competition films and she brings us this special report!

By Elisa Giudici

The oldest Film Festival of the world was the first to roar back from the pandemic. Venice International Film Festival president Francesco Ciccutto and artistic director Alberto Barbera worked hard to organize this year's edition. At first, it played like a fever dream: an international film festival in one of the nations that lived through the most severe lockdowns and highest death count just a few months ago?

Hollywood majors and newer realities like Netflix, which in the recent past Venice would coddle with attention, betrayed the Venetian Mostra, and didn't send a single movie. Old friends rallied, though. Pedro Almodóvar, Luca Guadagnino, Ann Hui, and Abel Ferrara wanted to be in Venice to help the Mostra. They were supported by European festivals early on in their filmmaking and didn't forget them in their time of need...

Barbera's choices in the official selection were less glamorous than ever but brave. The lineup featured a lot of young filmmakers, a record number of female directors, and the majority of movies dealt with social or political issues.

The winners reflect these selection choices but, in the end, the real winner in Venice was not Nomadland but the festival itself. As journalists, we suspected Zhao was going to take Golden Lion home even before the festival began. We were less sure that the Festival was going to arrive safely at its natural ending, without an outbreak or a lockdown. The Venetian Mostra did it! We were together, we saw movies and wrote about them. We just followed a couple of simple rules to be safe. Not a single cluster was recorded in Venice during the Festival. The sober style of the Venice Film Festival proved to be wise. In this dramatic year, there are few things to be proud of being Italian: the Venetian Mostra was one of them.

Let me introduce you to the winners...

Director Chloe Zhao on the set of "Nomadland"

Golden Lion (the top prize)
Nomadland by Chloé Zhao (US)

Toronto and Venice fought for this title during the summer, we knew it would be something big. When they then worked together to premiere the feature simultaneously, we understood Nomadland would be a protagonist in the upcoming award season. Is it good? For sure! Give Chloé Zhao the vastness of America's savage land during the first hours of the day, let her mix professional actors and amateurs with extraordinary life stories: she will deliver a memorable film. She is more than able to create a moving portrait of frugal, forgotten lives in nowadays America. And yet I am a little disappointed because you can tell she had to compromise with Searchlight (aka Disney, watch out for the changed logo at the beginning of the movie) to make her major studio debut. Nomadland will help her reach general audiences, but Nomadland feels like a less upright, less radical, more mediated version of The Rider. And yes, Frances McDormand has in her hands a ticket for Oscar night: she is simply amazing in this film.

Silver Lion (aka the best one we were not brave enough to choose as a Golden Lion)
New Order / Nuevo Orden by Michel Franco (Mexico)

One of the best movies you will see this year, even if it feels like your hope for the future of humanity is being beaten to death. It is described as a dystopia set in modern Mexico, but is New Order really that fictional? As a viewer, it is unnerving how real(istic) it seems. Protesters go to the streets asking for more equality, some wealthy families are attacked in their houses, some people (rich and poor) die, a lot of money and property is robbed or smash, and then the State comes in to control the situation. The explanation of how the New Order is instituted and dismantled is the core of the movie. Franco is incredible in his objectivity: he simply lets his characters follow the rules of a capitalistic society with a massive inequality gap, in a fragile democracy in which military forces have the last say. "Chilling" does not even begin to describe the act of witnessing this story play out. Do not get attached to any of the characters. Do not engage if you have any kind of violence trigger.

Silver Lion for Best Director
Wife of a Spy by Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Japan)

The most surprising WTF!?! moment and winner of the night. Kurosawa's movie is a well-made period drama set in Kobe just before the Second World War. Wife of a Spy tells the story of a sweet and caring wife of a wealthy tradesman. After the return of her loved husband from Manchuria, she discovers he is secretly helping Americans. Is the film good? Yes. Is it the best direction seen in The Venetian Mostra? Absolutely not. It is fine but forgettable, in comparison to other contenders. The costumes, though. The costumes are sublime.

Grand Jury Prize (essentially third place)
Dear Comrades! by Andrei Konchalovsky (Russia)

Take Paweł Pawlikowski's Cold War, minus the love story: that's Dear Comrades! Poor Konchalovsky, an old festival giant competing among young directors, awarded a "smaller" prize. Shot in black and white and 4:3 ratio, Dear Comrades! visually resembles a propaganda movie from the Soviet era. Settled in the Don region after Stalin's death, it is a tale of how the Communist regime started to malfunction and than...ops, it never functioned as it was intended to, since the very beginning. The protagonist is a woman who works for the Party, desperately believing in her nation and its politics, even if she witnesses every day the striking contradictions of it. She is a brave mother who fights with and against the Army and the KGB to save her daughter, in an atmosphere of quiet, alcohol-mitigated desperation that screams: "This is Russia!". The screenplay is pure perfection, the direction is impressive as usual, places and the faces have that strong USSR vibes needed to tell a story like this one. It's challenging to find a single mistake in this movie, though you have to be up for the emotional austerity of Russian auteurs' cinema.

Best Screenplay
The Disciple by Chaitanya Tamhane (India)

This Indian auteur is the pupil of Alfonso Cuarón. Well, Roma's director has good taste! The Disciple is sort of like Chazelle's Whiplash in the world of Indian classical music. The protagonist is a young student who devotes himself to the study of an ancient style of singing known as rag. He's the most devoted student of his old teacher. The movie is a cautionary tale of what you lose in pursuing perfection in any artistic field. Tamhane's work behind the camera is as uncompromising as his protagonist's work onscreen. Knowing close to nothing about Indian classical music, it was difficult for me to understand the technicality of the protagonist's musical struggle, though, so it felt much longer than its 127 minutes.

Volpi Cup for Best Actress
Vanessa Kirby in Pieces of Woman (Canada/Hungary)

A star is born in Venice. With two major roles in the official competition, Vanessa Kirby became the icon of the Festival. Yet both of her interpretations in Venice (this and her performance in Mona Fastvold's The World to Come) were not among my top five. This year we were blessed with an abundance of memorable female leads: Frances McDormand in Nomadland, Jasna Đuričić in Quo Vadis, Aida?, and Yuliya Vysotskaya in Dear Comrades being my three favourites among them. Kirby's portrayal of a grieving mother who loses her child a few minutes after giving birth is emotionally powerful, but the film lacks the insightful power of Kornél Mundruczó's earlier films. Conventionality is the price you have to pay to enter the international market of English speaking, star-filled movies.

Volpi Cup for Best Actor
Pierfrancesco Favino in Padrenostro (Italy)

A joke. A bad one. Favino is one of the best Italian actors of his generation and in the last few years, he's given some mind-blowing performances. The one he gives in Claudio Noce's Padrenostro, however, (one of the worst competition films) is the weakest of his late-career and dull, too. If you want to discover his work, please watch The Traitor by Marco Bellocchio instead.

Marcello Mastroianni Award for best young actor or actress
Zouhollah Zamani in Khōrshīd / Sun Children (Iran)

I knew Zamani would win this prize upon seeing this new drama from Iranian director Majid Majidi in which he plays the indigent but resourceful protagonist. For me, Sun Children is the perfect antidote to Capernaüm's shallow depiction of childhood in extreme poverty. Nadine Labaki's Oscar-nominated movie was obsessed with the terrible conditions in which her protagonists lived, Majidi's film focuses instead on Ali's attempts to find a way to become rich, in a childish yet intelligent way. Sun Children wants to remind us what it means to live in a place in which poor children are expected to work and not to go to school, and yet it is a sort of thriller, adventurous movie. It actually reminded me a bit of Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, but shot in contemporary Iran.

Finally, I'll leave you with a film that didn't win anything but should have...

If I chose the Golden Lion...
Mandibules by Quentin Dupieux (France/Belgium)

This is going to be a cult favourite in a couple of years, believe me. It is a shame it was presented out of the main competition because it could have aimed for a big prize. During the press conference, Dupieux was quite full of himself and impolite to the moderator, journalists, and translators. It's probably because he knows his movie about two simple dudes who discover a giant fly in the trunk of a stolen car is that good. His previous filmography is full of surreal, nonsensical elements, but the films always lacked balance. Here everything finally clicks in just the right way. Moreover, it is a terrific movie about friendship, and a much-needed comedy in this year full of depressing drama on and off the silver screen. Watch out for a splendid supporting performance from Adèle Exarchopoulos in this one, too.

Guest contributor: Elisa Giuduci.
Somewhere in Northern Italy since 1987. Cinemagoer, everyday reviewer, SFF & book lover. [Official Site (Italian) | Letterboxd]