Venice at Home: Day 10 – The Artist Is (Not) Present

by Cláudio Alves

Well, it's time to say goodbye to the Venice at Home project. Maybe it'll return next year as other cinephiles flood the Lido and those of us who don't share in the FOMO.  There are three remaining directors in the official competition. First, Jafar Panahi, incarcerated since earlier this year but no less capable of dazzling cinephiles with his political, profoundly personal work. No Bears sounds like another triumph. Also vying for the honor is Susanna Nicchiarelli, whose Chiara completes an unofficial trilogy about historical women (Miss Marx and Nico, 1988 also screened at Venice). Finally, Roschdy Zem jumps behind the camera after having graced festival audiences with his acting in Other People's Children. For Les Miens he does triple duty as star, director, and screenwriter.

This miniseries was always intended to celebrate great artists, so it's fitting that the last three films are about them as we focus on an Iranian filmmaker (This is Not a Film), a German singer (Nico, 1988), and a French clown (Chocolat) of Afro-Cuban heritage… 

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Tribeca: Trine Dyrholm makes a great "Nico 1988"

by Jason Adams

Although I might have been hallucinating by the time, given the sheer length and purposeful boredom of the experience, I'm pretty sure there's a portion of Andy Warhol's four-hour double-projector experimental film Chelsea Girls where the Velvet Underground singer Nico just sits and cuts her bangs for twenty straight minutes on camera. It felt like twenty straight minutes, anyway. And that was my introduction to her. Catherine Deneuve heroin chic - too cool for anybody, herself included.

That's the baggage one drags into a bio-pic about the singer, and that's what Susanna Nicchiarelli's film called Nico, 1988 insists on clipping away like those bangs. It's right there in the title - this is 1988, twenty-two years after Underground, after Andy, and this is a fully fifty-year-old woman with dark brown hair and a debilitating drug habit who does not give a shit...

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