Venice Film Festival: Preview #2

The Venice Film Festival kicks off next week and as usual there are bound to be some pleasant surprises. Who was to know that Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain would prove so magnificent and go on to receive so many awards following its 2005 Venice world premiere? This year, the director’s Life of Pi will instead open the New York Film Festival, while Mira Nair’s Venice opener, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, could be this year’s surprise package, even if it screens out of competition.
 
Four new films have been added to the Venice program. Screening in competition and making its world premiere is Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, which has widely been reported as a riff on scientology starring Philip Seymour Hoffman as the L. Ron Hubbard style leader. Anderson is reportedly uncomfortable with the tag and only admits to being inspired by the scientology leader in creating the character. Joaquin Phoenix plays a violent alcoholic World War II vet, who after returning from the war in the Pacific, falls under the influence of the master, the leader of a spiritual movement called the Cause.

Screening in 70mm, the film is bound to make its mark with all three men in attendance. It will be a bit different, of course, to when Phoenix hid from the press and skulked in to the screening of his best friend Casey Affleck’s 2010 mockumentary, I’m Still Here. Clearly he’s not given up acting, after all. After Venice, the film will move on to the Toronto Film Festival and the American press are already in overdrive anticipating the film. No surprise that it’s releasing through the awards-hungry Harvey Weinstein, who has moved the US release date forward to follow its Toronto berth. The Master releases here on November 8.
 
The remaining three films screen out of competition. German director Alex Schmidt’s horror film Du Hast Es Versprochen (Forgotten) will have a midnight screening. It follows two estranged childhood friends, Hanna (Mina Tander) and Clarissa (Laura de Boer), who return to the island where they spent their childhood vacations, only to be haunted by ghosts from their past. The Italian film Come voglio che sia il mio futuro? is the result of 81-year-old Italian director Ermanno Olmi interviewing students across Italy over the past five years. Maurizio Zaccaro has collated the interviews into a film offering a significant cross-section of the expectations, hopes, disappointments and fears of young people today. Pasquale Scimeca’s Convitto Falcone likewise focuses on the Italian youth and examines their coming to terms with their sense of justice, even in their small everyday gestures.
 
Naturally Italian films always represent a strong part of the Venice program, and probably second come the French, who always use the festival as a springboard into the post-blockbuster season. 
 
Olivier Assayas (Summer Hours, Carlos) exercises yet another shift in genre with Something in the Air, a loosely autobiographical drama. Filmed in France, Italy and the UK and set in the early 1970s, it features an unknown cast in its story of a Paris high school student swept up in the political fever of the time. Like Assayas, his dream is to paint and make films, something his friends cannot understand.
 
Xavier Giannoli’s Superstar features the unusual pairing of Cécile De France and Kad Merad and tells of a complete nobody becoming an overnight celebrity without knowing why. Sounds a lot like the experience of Merad, who shot to stardom in Dany Boon’s smash hit Bienvenue Chez Les Ch’tis (Welcome to the Sticks), though Merad has proved to be a remarkable talent.
 
The drollest of French actors and one of my favourites, Jean-Pierre Bacri, stars with Kristin Scott Thomas in Pascal Bonitzer’s Chez Hortense. He plays a professor of Chinese culture who lives with his theatre director wife and they are a little bored. When she urges him to solicit work papers from his public servant father for a woman called Zaria Velickovic, the mission becomes threatening as he has not been close to his father for some time and risks heading into a downward spiral.
 
Gérard Depardieu stars in the festival’s closing film, The Man Who Laughs, by Jean-Pierre Améris. The rotund, aging and still wonderfully naughty actor plays a travelling showman who offers shelter to a pair of orphans who eventually become part of his show. Hopefully, the film is as heartwarming as it purports to be: it will make audiences laugh and cry, says the blurb.
 
Michael Cimino and Spike Lee will also receive special career awards at the festival.