Venice at Home – Day 3: From Galleries to Gangsters

by Cláudio Alves

Day 3 at the Venice Film festival finds a nonfiction master dipping his foot into the murky waters of fictionalized narrative. Frederick Wiseman's A Couple purports to dramatize the correspondence between Leo Tolstoy and his wife, starring Nathalie Boutefeu, working from a script made from documented letters. Elsewhere in the official competition, Luca Guadagnino helms Bones & All, a cannibal romance starring Timothée Chalamet and Taylor Russell. Finally, Romain Gavras brings Athena to the festivities, working alongside Ladj Ly, who co-wrote the film.

As we wait for these movies to become more readily available, let's consider their directors' previous works, including an ode to museums, a fashionable short, and a Scarface revision…

NATIONAL GALLERY (2014) 

When it came time to choose what Wiseman film to cover, I got stuck at a crossroads of possibilities. Maybe I should focus on the director's debut feature – Tititcut Follies – the rare cinematic work to incur actual change in the off-screen world. Since Venice is in mind, either At Berkeley or Ex Libris could be apt choices, representing the first time Wiseman showed a film at the festival and his first official competition title. On the other hand, when one considers A Couple the rare departure into fiction filmmaking, a purview of the director's other works of that ilk – Seraphita's Diary and The Last Letter. 

In the end, I picked a project based on personal significance. National Gallery marked my introduction to Frederick Wiseman's cinema, making me an instant fan. But, of course, for a cineaste who could be called the greatest chronicler of American institutions in film history, this London-based doc is an uncommon variation. And yet, for all that it differs from Wiseman's topics in matters of geography, it's right at home among his output when it comes to theme and approach. As ever, the Oscar-winning auteur points his camera at the goings-on of a daunting organization, examining its operations as if it were a living organism, each worker another cell in the beast's body. 

Despite running for three hours, the doc's an absorbing experience that could have gone on for three more, and I wouldn't complain. Working as his editor, like usual, Wiseman articulates fly-on-the-wall observations until one can't help but be drawn to the topic at hand like one presumes the director must be. Neither idealizing nor castigating its subject, National Gallery is a love letter to museums everywhere as well as a dissection of specificities, a careful consideration of how such places work in the current day. That's the other thing - for how unchanged Wiseman's technique has remained virtually unchanged for over half a century, there's profound modernity to his most recent documentaries, an acknowledgment of change, mayhap an admiration that permeates and electrifies the screen.

National Gallery is streaming on Kanopy.

THE STAGGERING GIRL (2019)

What separates art from commerce? Is there a barrier keeping the two apart, or is that assumed threshold nothing but a lie we tell ourselves out of a need for comfort, validation, purpose? When regarding a piece like The Staggering Girl, such questions inexorably arise, threatening to taint whatever aesthetic pleasure one might take from the movie cum commercial. According to its director, it's a medium-length art film based on Valentino Haute Couture. To its detractors, the thing's no more than an overlong commercial for the brand's 2018 Fall/Winter collection.

Maybe it's both, maybe neither. I'd argue dogmatic classifications as one or the other miss the point while acknowledging that the film fails through whatever lens one might hope to categorize it.

Michael Mitnick's screenplay is a memory play of nebulous specifics, a text that serves as the skeleton for Guadagnino and company's dreamy formalism intent on selling luxury goods. Julianne Moore plays a writer traveling from New York to Rome in hopes of retrieving her ailing mother, a painter who's lost her sight in old age. Through her journey, strange apparitions make themselves known, memory usurps the present, and all men wear the same face. Curiously, the clothes are the picture's most vehement failure, empty ornaments that never entirely function as costuming. Thankfully, the cast is beautiful, and so is Sayombhu Mukdeeprom's cinematography. Ryuichi Sakamoto's score also delights. Despite this, a prevailing sense of hollowness blocks genuine introspection and encumbers sensualism.

Even as one wishes to keep things positive in these Venice at Home flashbacks, some auteurs deserve criticism, especially when they've been so well-loved at The Film Experience. So here goes a dash of hope - Bones & All must surely be better than this.

The Staggering Girl is streaming on MUBI. You can also rent it on Amazon and Apple iTunes.

THE WORLD IS YOURS (2018)

Since his early shorts, Romain Gavras has paid homage to Hollywood's long history of anesthetized crime, violence made a spectacle. Still, these referential works aren't always reverential. On the contrary - while something like The World Is Yours might take its title from Scarface, its tone is no toothless pastiche. Gavras prefers to use criminal iconography as the tool through which to puncture the gangster figure, profaning the celluloid mythos by making melodrama into farce. There's nothing aspirational about Farés, the movie's lead. Indeed, he'd be aptly described as a feckless mommy's boy with shit for brains and a pathetic air.

Dreaming of a new life he can't afford, the small-time dealer fashions himself into a gangster without the backbone to sustain it. On his way to escaping the criminal life, the man flies to Spain and bungles a simple drug deal. Chaos ensues, more in the style of a tragic screwball than a straight tragedy, especially when Farés' mother comes into the picture with schemes of her own. Isabelle Adjani plays the gaudily dressed matriarch, stealing every scene she's in like a storm of leopard print with impeccable timing. Nevertheless, while the actress plays up the nonsense, not every cast member indulges in the same tonalities.

Gavras orients his actors around a delicate balancing act where seriousness and ridicule oscillate as much as the hand-held camera. The picture's formal style is similarly juggled, appealing to pop sensibilities and social realism in equal measure. A popping soundtrack full of 80s French songs and more modern bops offers perfect accompaniment, exemplifying The World Is Yours' game plan and how it succeeds against all odds. For those who lament how the movies glorify a life of crime, this might be the perfect flick – subverting paradigms of coolness until you can't help but laugh at how silly everything is. 

The World Is Yours is streaming on Netflix.

Which one of these filmmaker's new projects is you most excited for?