Caricature Russian guests became the heroes of Roman Polanski’s film “Palace”
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The out-of-competition program of the 80th Venice Film Festival hosted the world premiere of The Palace by Roman Polanski, co-produced by Switzerland, Italy, Poland and France. In August, the master celebrated his 90th birthday. His life has recently been accompanied by constant scandals and accusations of sexual violence, so he constantly has to hide, and he did not come to Venice. Yes, the years take their toll.
After the premiere of the film “The Order of Time” by 90-year-old Liliana Cavani with the participation of Ksenia Rappoport, 90-year-old Polanski presented his fresh opus. According to the Italian producer of the film Luca Barbareschi, he was given with great difficulty. In 2019, Polanski also presented in Venice his film “An Officer and a Spy” in absentia, which received the Grand Prix, and before that caused an attack on the directorate of the film festival, which dared to include in the competition the film of a man accused of raping a 13-year-old girl back in 1978 , as well as in several more recent episodes. However, scandals only play into the hands of any festival, and getting a fresh work of a classic of this level is a matter of honor. This year’s festival also includes out of competition a new film by 87-year-old Woody Allen, who is also like persona non grata at many festivals due to allegations of violence.
Polanski told somewhere how he spent the millennium in one of the Swiss hotels, where he was invited, apparently to decorate society. He was so impressed by what he saw that he was inspired by the idea to make a movie about the collapse of the bourgeois world. However, with the implementation of the plan, he was decades late and now looks like an outsider.
Everyone remembers what madness swept the world on the eve of the year 2000. Polanski’s new film takes place on December 31, 1999, in a luxurious Swiss hotel in the Alps, where 50 guests arrive – one more wonderful than the other, caricatured millionaires from all over the world with their own troubles. All this reminded me of Ruben Ostlund’s “Triangle of Sorrow”, which received all conceivable and unthinkable awards, where events take place on a cruise yacht and where the rich also indulge in pleasures, and among them is a Russian oligarch specializing in the sale of manure. You can sneer at the modest artistic merits of the Swedish film as much as you like, but it is obvious that he hooked on something important, since he entered the top and received a clip of first-class awards. And now Polanski seems to have gone along the path beaten by others, although this is not so – the “order of time” simply affected, years that do not allow intensive work.
The script was written by Polanski together with his friend of his youth, and now the Polish classic Jerzy Skolimowski, a great master of hoaxes. Polanski defined the genre as grotesque comedy, but one can speak of both black comedy and the comedy of the absurd. The music for the film was written by Alexandre Desplat, the cameraman was Pavel Edelman – they are also Polanski’s old associates. An impressive cast of actors has been assembled – real monsters of world cinema, from Oliver Mazucci and Fanny Ardant to John Cleese and Mickey Rourke. Sometimes one of their appearances is enough to make it both wild and funny. And this applies primarily to Mickey Rourke, who himself is perceived as a sacred monster. He played a crazy financier with a speaking surname Crash, who is unexpectedly visited by Czech relatives, and this is a separate divertissement.
Among the crowd of fantastic characters there are also Russian guests with suitcases of money led by the colorful hero Alexander Petrov. Terrible girls Natasha, Zoika and others are primitively played by little-known actresses and models, but it seems that Polanski achieved such an effect. In the camarilla of other Russian guests – Anton Pampushny, Danilo Kotov and a number of actors unknown to us, speaking with a slight accent and obviously found in the vastness of Europe. The greedy Russian ambassador Belov was played by Ilya Volokh, a native of Kyiv, a master of sports in rowing, an actor with an impressive list of small roles of “bad Russians”. The ambassador’s wife is not averse to drinking, and while her high-ranking husband sorts things out with the lads, she will bury her head in a plate of black caviar.
Instead of relaxing, the Russians sit in front of the TV – they look at Boris Yeltsin, who says: “I’m tired, I’m leaving, I did my best” – and names a successor. And now the new head of state speaks from the screen about the guarantees of freedom of speech and other gains of democracy. No one knows him yet, and it is not clear how to proceed further, whether to ask the ambassador for a larger share. In the eyes of Alexander Petrov – a kind of Russian madness, a crazy brilliance, which, apparently, determined the choice of the actor. I liked Petrov Polanski very much.
The hotel staff can barely keep up with the indefatigable guests. Especially goes to the manager, who feels like a powder keg, but manages to reconcile everyone. Every minute something happens to the guests. Either the Marquise’s dog (Fanny Ardant) crap himself on the sheets, or someone has a nose injury. One of the guests will be especially in demand – a plastic surgeon, Dr. Lima. We see the works of his hands with our own eyes. A whole host of old women arrived at the hotel, disfigured by numerous operations, crooked mouths … They are so deliberately terrible that they cause an attack of laughter. The doctor also treats Marquise’s Chihuahua, examines the bowel movements. In the end, everything will be fine with the dog, and she will love the penguin. And this is a gift from a 97-year-old millionaire (John Cleese) to his 22-year-old wife. The fate of this strange couple will be the most tragically funny. In general, Polanski showed this world a fig as he could in his 90s.
The action of another competition film — the thriller The Theory of Everything by Tim Krueger (Germany-Austria-Switzerland) — also takes place in the Swiss Alps, in an old hotel where something is going wrong — the realm of the owner of the Copper Mountain just comes to life. The black and white picture is shot in the spirit of the 50s. At the same time, modern music by Diego Ramos Rodriguez sounds. Something strange is going on in the hotel. People die, a girl appears and disappears, whose dates on the tombstone do not seem to correspond to reality. There is in all this the magic of real cinema, giving rise to riddles.
Newspaper headline:
Yeltsin in the palace
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