VENICE FILM FESTIVAL awards 2024

[Chris Knipp]

ADRIEN BRODY INTHE BRUTALIST

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2024 (AUG. 28 - SEPT. 7, 2024) . SOURCE (Jessica Kiang, VARIETY)

Buzz suggested the ambitious and reportedly magnificent 3 1/2 - hour Brady Corbet fictional bio-epic THE BRUTALIST (starring Adrian Brody, Guy Pearce) would get the Golden Lion from the jury chaired by Isabelle Huppert, but it went to the milder Almodóvar film, his first in English, THE ROOM NEXT DOOR, starring Julianne Mooore and Tilda Swinton, instead.

Brady Corbet got Best Director for THE BRUTALIST, THE ROOM NEXT DOOR Best Picture, and Best Actor went to Nicole Kidman for her lead role in BABYGIRL directed by Dutch actor-filmmaker Halina Reijn. (Kidman could not attend the awards; she had to rush home after the passing of her mother.) Romanian director Bogdan Mureşanu won the award in the Horizons sidebar for THE NEW YEAR THAT NEVER CAME, a drama about resistance and revolution. Scandar Copti's HAPPY HOLIDAYS took the Horizons Best Screenplay award. Best Director, Best Actress and Best Debut Feature went to Sarah Friedland's film about aging, FAMILIAR TOUCH.

Searchlight and Sony Pictures Classics are in contention at Toronto to acquire Brady Corbet's bio-epic, which is about a fictitious Hungarian Jewish escapee from Europe called László Tóth, played by Adrien Brody, who becomes an important architect in America. Peter Bradshaw in his Venice GUARDIAN review gave it five stars and said it "stuns and electrifies." Bradshaw wrote:

This is a film with thrilling directness and storytelling force, a movie that fills its widescreen and three-and-a half-hour running time with absolute certainty and ease, as well as glorious amplitude, clarity and even simplicity – and yet also with something darkly mysterious and uncanny to be divined in its handsome shape.

The Oscar Expert's 'Brother Bro' (in a video review of THE BRUTALIST filmed at TIIF) said it is "thrilling to behold" and that he would go back and rewatch its three and a half hours "in a heartbeat." They are sure it will get multiple nominations, including score, and say Brody is brilliant. (They are considering other titles, Sean Baker's ANORA and Jacques Audiard's EMELIA PEREZ.) Bradshaw wrote that THE BRUTALIST " is about antisemitism and the capitalist adventure, about the unassimilated immigrant experience and about American can-do naivety versus the tragic, painful depths of European culture and expertise."


VERMIGLIO

The Venice Grand Jury Prize went to an Italian war film by Maura Delpero, VERMIGLIO.

The VARIETY review calls it “a momentous vision of everyday rural existence in the high Italian Alps” and Jury president Isabelle Huppert expressed her own fervent admiration, at the post-award press conference, for its slanted take as a war story without any war in it. “It’s like you have a great offscreen subject matter, but you get to see what’s going on only through a small eye, through the latch of a door,” she said - Jessicaa Kiang.

VERMIGLIO was only outdone in breathtaking formalist austerity by Special Jury Prize-winner Déa Kulumbegashvili’s extraordinary APRIL, which Variety’s Guy Lodge called “an uncompromising, intensely felt panorama of female identities, agencies and desires under attack — by the patriarchy, certainly, but sometimes by the intangible cruelties of nature itself." - Kiang.

Bradshaw on APRIL (four stars), in which he says the Georgian director Dea Kulumbegashvili "comes ito her own" with what he calls a "haunting abortion drama": "Shocking violence is tempered by strange, silent sequences in a sophomore feature about an obstetrician under investigation, which has echoes of THE PIANO TEACHER," Bradshaw writes. I reviewed Kulumbegashvili's first film BEGINNING as part of the 2020 Virtual New York Film Festival.


GEORGIAN DIRECTOR DEA KULUMBEGASHVILI'S APRIL

[Chris Knipp]

NICOLE KIDMAN, HARRIS DICKINSON IN BABYGIRL

MORE ABOUT VENICE: BABYGIRL

BABYGIRL, which won Best Actress for Nicole Kidman at this year's festival, costars 28-year-old English actor Harris Dickinson (BEACH RATS, TRIANGLE OF SADNESS, SCRAPPER), and has now received a rating of 81% on Metacritic ("Universal Acclaim). It's the tale of a female CEO embarking on a hot, risky affair with a young male intern. Iis an erotic thriller with comic undertones, or rather, as an Italian Letterboxd commenter puts it, citing an Italian review, experiments with changes of tone, freely "moving between romantic, dramatic and comic-grotesque elements." Antonio Banderas has a supporting role as the longtime relationship of Rony (Kidman) who doesn't turn her on enough anymore. An enthusiastic Babby Levitt in The Daily Beast has written that the movie's "real radicalism comes in its bracingly honest approach to sex, power, and discovering what makes you tick." Above all reports are of the film's sexiness. Levitt says "BABYGIRL has the wildest, most explicit sex scenes of Nicole Kidman's career." Levitt says it "takes a certain kind of bravery to star in a film like this." Kidman herself has said she's scared to seer herself in the movie because the sex is so intimate (and played out at such length). But the humor is there. "The sex is steamy and kinky, but it’s also funny and clumsy," Levitt says. He calls it "unexpected, shocking, and hilarious" and concludes that it's "One of the best films of the year."

BABYGIRL has been picked up by A24, who are making us wait till Christmas to see it.

[Chris Knipp]

IMAGE FROM ONE TO ONE: JOHN & YOKO

OTHER TITLES AT VENICE

Other notable titles at Venice: MARIA, the biopic about opera diva Maria Callas, directed by Pablo Larraín and a "high-camp turn" by Angelina Jolie,has not been so well received: Its Metacritic rating is a paltry 63%. Perhaps an overdue subject is the documentary ONE TO ONE: JOHN AND YOKO, directed by Kevin Macdonald & Sam Rice-Edwards, about about John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Kevin Macdonald was directed THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND and incidentally is the grandson of RED SHOES and TALES OF HOFFMAN codirector Emeric Pressberger. No critical consensus recorded on Metacritic yet but the film sounds promising. The doc, which Sheri Linden describes as "exhilerating" in her HOLLYWOOD REPORTER review, comgines footage of a 1972 benefit concert with rich archival material to paint a portrait of the former Beatle and his artist wife during their first months in New York. My recent viewing of the coming doc DAYTIME REVOLUTION, about a week when the couple hosted the Mikee Douglas TV show, shows how interesting and misunderstood this couple was.

The log-in film review site THE VERDICT has a roundup of Venice hightlights. It notes that soome of the "most splashy, starry, newsworthy world premieres" nonetheless "left the Lido empty-handed." This included Luca Guadagnino’s "sumptuous" William Burroughs adaptation QUEER seemed "tailor-made for awards," particularly its lead performance by Daniel Craig, who is "very much flexing his post-Bond Serious Actor muscles rather than his star status." But Isabel Huppert’s jury, as well as the critics, were "lukewarm."

[Chris Knipp]

The Seed of the Sacred Fig (Persian: دانه*ی انجیر معابد, romanized: Dane ye Anjir e Maabed; French: Les Graines du figuier sauvage; German: Die Saat des heiligen Feigenbaums)


THE SEED OF THE SACRED FIG (Mohammad Rasoulof) wasn't aired at Venice, but after Cannes at Locarno, Telluride and Toronto, among other venues. It is an important film just because it exists; the filmmaker escaped after being given an 8-year prison sentence in Iran. It is, and Jordan Mintzer's Cannes review in HOLLYWOOD REPORTER heralds it as "Mohammad Rasoulof’s "powerful indictment of Iranian oppression throiugh the eyes of one unraveling family," whose membres are chronicled in a three-hour drama. I've been reviewing MOHAMMAD RASOULOF'S films since the 2005 IRON ISLAND; also reported on A MAN OF INTEGRITY (2017) and THERE IS NO EVIL (2020). SACRED FIG can get oscar submission because one of the producing cointries, Germany, intends to submit it. It's in the Main Slate of the NYFF. The "sacred fig" in questin is a type of fig that flourishes by spreading over another tree and smothering it: a metaphor for Iran's theocratic state and its citizenry.