Andrey Plakhov about the first premieres of the Venice Film Festival

The first world film premieres were held in Venice. And journalists from reputable foreign publications cannot decide which events of the festival should be considered worthy of priority coverage. They are trying to help Andrey Plakhov.

Even before the official opening, Liliana Cavani’s film “The Order of Time” was shown: this is the first of the film versions of the “end of the world”, but obviously not the last at this festival. In the house on the seashore, at the invitation of the birthday girl, her friends and friends gather – lawyers, psychoanalysts and, most importantly, physicists; just in time comes the news of an asteroid rushing towards the Earth and threatening to destroy it. Physicists quickly turn into lyricists. The proximity of the catastrophe makes them at an accelerated pace understand their relationship, poisoned by falsehood and omissions. But everyone gets off with a slight fright; in extreme cases, the fifty-year-old mistress of the house will find that she has not quite correctly determined her sexual orientation and that it is not too late to fulfill her romantic dream – to go to the Pamirs and cling to the spiritual sources of the universe. One of the main roles in this cosmic psychodrama is played by Ksenia Rappoport, who is completely organic in the ensemble of Italian artists.

A real, not fictional, story from Italian life was played by veteran American director Michael Mann in the film Ferrari. The famous race car driver, designer and founder of the brand empire Enzo Ferrari (played by Adam Driver) is shown at a critical period in his rich biography. In 1957, his relationship with his wife and business partner Laura (Penelope Cruz) came to a standstill after the death of their offspring, and Enzo finds solace in a second, informal family, where his son is growing up. At the same time, the Ferrari company is on the verge of bankruptcy, and the Mille Miglia race on Italian off-road takes the lives of not only the pilot, but also several third-party people, including five children – which greatly harms the social image of the hero. The story, of course, is not without interest, but it would have been limited to a melodramatic biopic, if not for the monumental Michael Mann, a powerful American epic sculpted from someone else’s material with stunning music and luxurious filming of auto racing. And Penelope Cruz, who “stole” the triumph from her partner, has already been tipped for an Oscar – despite her very strange English with an indestructible Spanish accent.

Directorial inventiveness is no less, and perhaps even more in the political grotesque of Pablo Larrain’s “The Count”. The Chilean director, after pop-colored film biographies of Jacqueline Kennedy and Princess Diana, turned to the figure of the dictator Pinochet and presented him as a vampire, sucking blood from everyone who comes to hand for centuries, but especially willingly from revolutionaries of all stripes. It roams the wide world for centuries and eventually anchors in Latin America. His accomplice in the crimes of the bloody dictatorship is the Russian Cossack counter-revolutionary Fyodor, and his very close relative is Margaret Thatcher. “Graf” is a reaction to the conservatism creeping around the world, and to the increasingly diverse forms of fascism. Filmed in black-and-white “cinephile” mode, Larrain’s film stylistically resembles Alexander Sokurov’s experiments at the intersection of documentary and fiction, but differs in the costs of the leftist agenda and in places looks clearly “overcooked”.

But “Dogman” by Luc Besson is a movie completely devoid of intellectual claims and addressed exclusively to the audience’s emotions. A tale about a man subjected to terrible violence in childhood, but who managed to survive and leave his mark in an unfairly organized world. The abuser father locked little Douglas in a cage with a pack of dogs, and he came out with an invalid. But not at all because the dogs offended him; on the contrary, they became the hero’s best friends, his family, his only shared love. The charismatic actor Caleb Landry Jones enters the cabaret stage straight from his wheelchair, disguised as Edith Piaf or Marlene Dietrich, and the dogs, performing any task and, it seems, reading the thoughts of their adored owner, play the role of a magnificent retinue.

Luc Besson made the best film of his late period. One can argue about how festival-like it is, but the journalistic community is not concerned with this question at all, but with another one: whether to draw attention to the work of the author, whose reputation is tarnished by accusations of sexual crimes. It doesn’t matter that his guilt has not been proven, but his innocence has not been proven either, and according to the “new ethics” this is sufficient reason for a person to be blacklisted.

The Venice Festival and its director Alberto Barbera refuse to abide by these rules. And now Variety magazine publishes an article about the suffering of journalists from the Agence France-Presse, who do not know how to cover the festival and what topic to make headlines. If it’s about Besson or Woody Allen, no matter what happened. It’s easier for the umpteenth time to sing the strike of Hollywood actors.