Ksenia Rappoport will present two films in Venice – Italian and Lithuanian

Passions around Bradley Cooper’s false nose erupted shortly before the premiere

On August 30, the 80th Venice Film Festival opened on the island of Lido. Its first showings started at 8.30. In the evening, the official ceremony took place. The honorary “Golden Lion” for lifetime achievement, as they call merit in cinema, was awarded to the Italian director Liliana Cavani, best known for her film “The Night Porter”.

In 1974, this picture about the love of a victim and an executioner, a concentration camp prisoner and an SS man, caused a scandal. She was accompanied by legal proceedings, and only after that the audience could see her in the form in which she was conceived and filmed by the author. In January, Liliana Cavani turned 90 years old, and she is still in the working ranks. In Venice, her new film “The Order of Time” will be shown, where the heroes meet in a villa and suddenly find out that the end of the world is approaching and they have only a few hours left, which means they need to do something important. The first screening took place early in the morning, and in the evening Cavani received an award from the hands of the leading lady in The Night Porter, Charlotte Rampling. Cavani has always had an interest in history and its heroes. In 1964, she filmed The Age of Stalin.

In her new film, the main roles were played by Claudia Gerini and Richard Sammel. In an interview with MK six years ago, Richard, who starred in the films Inglourious Basterds and Life is Beautiful, told how tired of the endless roles of Wehrmacht soldiers, how he read Pushkin in Saratov and how his work with Lev Dodin did not take place. And now he met the actress of his theater – Ksenia Rappoport – on the set of Liliana Cavani.

Xenia has a long relationship with the Venice Film Festival. In 2006, she played the title role in The Stranger by the Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore and won the 2007 David di Donatello Award from the Italian Academy of Cinematography for her. A year later, she was the host of the opening and closing ceremonies of the 65th Venice Film Festival. At the 66th festival, Ksenia received the Volpi Cup for best actress in the film Double Time by Giuseppe Capotondi. Later, she joined the jury of the Horizons program. In Italy, she received other awards – “Sympathy” in Rome “for outstanding civic activity”, the prize of the International Film Festival in Taormina for her role in “St. George’s Day” by Kirill Serebrennikov, “The Star of Italy” for her outstanding contribution to relations between Italy and Russia in the field movie. “Ksenia is not only yours, but also our actress,” it was said at the presentation of the honorary title of Cavalier in the field of cinema in Italy.

In the first days of the festival, another premiere will take place with the participation of Xenia – “The Photographer” by the Soviet-Lithuanian director Andrius Yuzenas, with whom she starred ten years ago in the film “The Excursion Girl” about Stalin’s repressions (we were nominated for the “Nika” award). In addition to Rappoport, The Photographer starred Fyodor Dobronravov and German actor Sebastian Hulk, known for the films All Quiet on the Western Front by Edward Berger, Baby Joe by Jessica Hausner, Transit by Christian Petzold.

The opening film was “Comandante” by the Neapolitan Edoardo De Angelis, who urgently replaced Luca Guadagnino’s “Pretenders” with Zendea, Josh O’Connor and Mike Feist, who dropped out due to the Hollywood strikes.

The most surprising intrigue of Gogol’s scale is connected with the competition picture “Maestro” by Bradley Cooper. After the trailer was released, passions unfolded around her in social networks, and then in the press, connected with the fact that Cooper, instead of inviting an actor of Jewish origin to play the role of American composer Leonard Bernstein (author of West Side Story), played himself and stuck his nose inappropriate sizes. And this is nothing but a stereotype and a sign of anti-Semitism. The situation reached the point of absurdity. Bernstein’s kids came out in support of Bradley Cooper. The big nose didn’t offend them. Their father had one. Gogol’s situation. Now Bradley Cooper’s nose will, like Major Kovalev’s Nose, walk, although not along Nevsky Prospekt, but along Lido Island – to live a life separate from the character. In general, Maestro arrived in Venice with a mind-blowing train, and this will only add interest to the picture.

Published in the newspaper “Moskovsky Komsomolets” No. 29104 dated August 31, 2023

Newspaper headline:
Venetian history of Xenia Rappoport