At the Venice Film Festival, Penelope Cruz and Chiara Mastroianni appeared as unhappy mothers
[ad_1]
Looking at a woman through the lens of a child
At the 79th Venice Film Festival, taking place on the island of Lido, there are more than ever films featuring children as heroes. However, they are just an excuse to talk about adulthood. The focus of attention was a woman whom the directors consider through the optics of a child – their own or someone else’s.
A year ago, Penélope Cruz and Antonio Banderas took to the deserted star track, devoid of spectators due to covid restrictions, to present the “Official Competition” of Argentine directors Gaston Duprat and Mariano Cohn. They accepted Penelope as the queen of the Lido. And this time she was met royally. She herself does nothing about it. The name and biography are ahead of the curve. In the Argentine film, she played a director, a feminist and a lesbian who kissed an aspiring actress right on the set to the point of insanity. Now she is an unhappy mother, beaten by a despotic husband, raising a daughter who prefers to dress like a boy. She even develops a romantic relationship with Sarah, the same age, who is unaware that this is not a guy at all. In Immensity by Emmanuele Crialese, Penelope Cruz played the forty-year-old mother of the family. She has three other small children, and her husband leads a double life, which his wife is aware of. And her whole life is a continuous torment.
The premiere of “The Immensity” took place on Sunday, when Venice was overflowing with tourists who came to the annual regatta. In the evening, crowds of people rushed to the Lido, filled the square in front of the Grande Hall. To compete in the number of fans with Penelope Cruz could only play the cannibal Timothy Chalamet, who presented a little earlier the American film “Together with the Bones” by the Italian director Luca Guadagnino. Penelope Cruz has been holding the bar for many years. Her presence in any European film is enough to get the film to the world’s major festivals.
Romantic against the odds, Rebecca Zlotowski’s Other People’s Children is another look at a woman through a child. The 40-year-old sexy Rachel exuding femininity was superbly played by Virginie Efira. Her heroine is a school teacher, and her attractive image is all the more unusual. In our tradition, the teacher is more like a bluestocking, a dull being, incapable of love. And Rachel has a stormy personal life, but no children. She finally meets the man of her dreams. Quite unexpectedly, the famous French actor of Arab origin Rashid Zem appeared in the role of an ideal lover. He alone brings up a little daughter, although his first wife, whose role was played by Chiara Mastroianni, is alive and well, she just has her own life. Rachel becomes attached to the girl, but at some point she realizes that she will still remain a stranger to her, and her mother, whatever she may be, is still a mother.
Chiara Mastroianni – the daughter of Catherine Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni – did not make such a brilliant film career as they did, and is doomed to endless comparisons with them. But here she is in her place: not very young, in confusion, the nature of which we take for granted. Something in her life went wrong, and with her she took her loved ones into this abyss. The name of Chiara Mastroianni is the first in the credits, although she has a very small role, and she is in many ways inferior to Virginie Efira. Her great mother Catherine Deneuve at the very beginning of the festival received an honorary “Golden Lion” for a brilliant career.
“Monica” by Andrea Pallario – a native of Italy, living in America (this year is fruitful for Italians who have worked in other geographical latitudes) – is another female story. The main character, played by the American Trace Lisette, is the very triumph of the flesh. She, like an overripe fruit, lives in languor, but unexpectedly gets a job as a nurse for an elderly woman, Evgenia, who needs care (Patricia Clarkson played her). Strange feelings arise between them, as if they were mother and daughter, who have not received something in life – one is the love of the mother, the second is the affection of the daughter. When the house becomes deserted, they are left alone, and there is such a powerful reflection, such a secret life of two women who cannot get enough of each other. But the whole truth should not be revealed to the audience, let it be a surprise for them. There are three small children of the son of Evgenia in the house, and Monica treats them like family, but still remains at a distance.
In the Japanese competition film “Love Life” by Koji Fukuda, a young woman loses her young son who drowns in the bathroom of a small apartment during a family holiday. The deaf-mute father of the boy, absent for a long time, comes to the funeral. He is half Korean and speaks sign language. It seems that life has stopped and nothing good will happen anymore, although the heroine is only 34 years old. But everything is bizarrely transformed. The sacrificial heroine, ready to leave her beloved man, who raised her child, for the sake of her first deaf-mute husband in need of care, suddenly makes a discovery: life is beautiful, and everything is still ahead. And the strange Korean will turn out to be not so harmless, he will divorce his ex-wife for money in order to go to the wedding of an adult son from his first marriage, whom he has not seen for twenty years. But this is a purely Japanese view of the world order and a woman.
Newspaper headline:
Unhappy mothers: Penelope Cruz and Chiara Mastroianni
[ad_2]
Source link
