Crowned with laurels – Newspaper Kommersant No. 159 (7360) of 08/31/2022

Today, August 31, the 79th International Film Festival opens in Venice. This event, one of the three most important in the European festival season, comments Alexey Tarkhanov.

The number 79 inspires respect for any other festival in the world, even Cannes. The Venetian is older than all of them, and it is not for nothing that Venice is called the grand dame of the festival movement. Without waiting for the 80th anniversary, the curators of the festival, headed by Alberto Barbera, put together a program of extra-class directors and actors: it is difficult to imagine a brighter and more impressive one in the landscape of modern cinema. Although the nominal list and the real artistic level of the presented works do not always coincide, so the final conclusions can be made only at the end of the festival.

There are 23 films in the competition – this is also, in fact, a record figure, significantly exceeding the festival standard. The festival will open with Noah Baumbach’s Netflix adaptation of Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise, starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig. The cult novel captures the absurdity and madness of 1980s America, but, according to Baumback, corresponds to the current situation of post-pandemic and hybrid wars. Another notable American entry in the competition is Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale. His hero suffers from obesity and a difficult relationship with his daughter: Brandon Fraser and Sadie Sink play father and daughter, respectively.

New Zealander Andrew Dominik’s “Blonde” is doomed to increased attention – a free and scandalously frank biopic of Marilyn Monroe, based on the novel by Joyce Carol Oates: Ana de Armas plays the goddess of sex, and the director focuses on the study of individual traumas and the collective unconscious.

Mexican Alejandro González Iñárritu hasn’t filmed in his homeland for a long time, but it was there that he found the plot and inspiration for the comedy Bardo, or the False Chronicle of Several Truths. The director himself defines its plot as “a chronicle of a journey between reality and imagination, between these two illusions, the boundaries of which cannot be deciphered.” The Italian Luca Guadagnino filmed the film “Entirely and Completely” in the USA; Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet star as young heroes living on the fringes of society, the main themes are love and cannibalism. Martin McDonagh returns to his historical homeland, Ireland, where he shoots the absurdist satire “The Banshee of Inishira” starring Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell. Florian Zeller follows in the wake of his super-successful “Father” with the new film “Son”, again based on his own play, again with Anthony Hopkins, as well as Hugh Jackman and Laura Dern.

For obvious reasons, special attention is focused on the new film “Without Bears” by the disgraced director Jafar Panahi thrown behind bars by the Iranian authorities. Although the director of the festival, Alberto Barbera, claims that the picture was invited long before that, so its inclusion in the competition was by no means a political decision.

Against the background of the campaign to “abolish the Tolstoy culture”, the experience of 92-year-old documentary film veteran Frederic Wiseman’s “Couple” looks like a bold act: it is based on the correspondence of Leo Tolstoy with Sofya Andreevna. Filming took place in France, in the park of La Boulaye, as well as on the rocks and beaches of the island of Belle-Ile. According to the director, “animals, insects, flowers, trees and sounds of the garden are the characters of the film, which is otherwise a monologue of Sofya Andreevna Tolstaya.”

Many intriguing premiere film events will also take place outside the main competition. At least the long-awaited “Kingdom: Exodus” by Lars von Trier, in which the Danish director returns to the characters of his long-standing series about a mystical and incredibly funny hospital. The program “Horizons” will present a film by Ukrainian director Antonio Lukich “Luxembourg, Luxembourg”. Another sign of the presence on the festival map of the hottest European region to date is Sergei Loznitsa’s Kyiv Trial, a continuation of his own Babi Yar, a chronicle of the trial of Nazi criminals in Kyiv in January 1946. Of the films related to the Soviet and post-Soviet space, we mention the retrospective screening of “Bro” by the Tajik Bakhtiyor Khudoynazarov, as well as the “Eastern” by the Kazakh director Adilkhan Yerzhanov “Goliath”.