New films by Yorgos Lanthimos and Roman Polanski at the Venice Film Festival

The first week of the Venice Film Festival brought the unequivocal leadership in the competition to Yorgos Lanthimos’ film “The Poor Unfortunate”. The out-of-competition “Palace” by Roman Polanski did not arouse any enthusiasm. With details – Andrey Plakhov.

“The Poor Unfortunate” is a translation of the title of the novel by the Scot Alasdair Gray, a modernized version of “Frankenstein”, rooted in Russia. The Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, who has become an international star, has attracted another writer, Tony McNamara, to the film adaptation project, with whom they together made the brilliant “Favorite”. So, “Poor-unfortunate” is a new outstanding achievement of this duet, or rather, this trio, since actress Emma Stone can rightly be counted among the co-authors of the film. She played in the same “Favorite”, but remained there in the shadow of Olivia Colman. Then Lanthimos filmed a mystical short film with her in Greece, and now he gave a benefit role in a large complex picture, where Stone proves herself to be a first-class bold actress, fluent in the tools of the grotesque and eccentric.

Her heroine Bella, unable to bear her marriage to an aggressive petty tyrant, despite her pregnancy, throws herself into the river. She is brought back to life by the experimental scientist Godwin Baxter, who himself became the object of the experiment in his time and seemed to be sewn from separate fragments (an excellent role and a cool make-up by Willem Dafoe). A fanatical doctor transplants the brain of her unborn child into a drowned woman, which explains Bella’s completely infantile behavior at the beginning of the film. However, she learns quickly, learns a lot of important things about her body, and most importantly, her soul and craving for knowledge of the world awaken in her. Bella leaves her fiancé (Rami Youssef) and travels with a lawyer (Mark Ruffalo) to Portugal, Alexandria and Paris, acquiring the practice of working in a brothel, as well as joining the fanfare of socialism.

She eventually becomes a doctor and turns the world around her into a divine utopia. All oppressed women, races and classes find their place in the bucolic dacha landscape, while a chicken with the head of a French bulldog, a hybrid of a deer and a cat, and the main abuser, who is transplanted with the brain of a goat, happily run around the lawn. Intellectual brilliance, emotions, sensuality, magnificent decor, inexhaustible fantasy – the spectrum of merits of Lanthimos’ film. The ideas of feminism are woven into it aptly, easily and with humor, which Lanthimos used to hide for some reason under the mask of a cold vivisector.

Roman Polanski’s “Palace” appeared in Venice in a halo of gossip excited by a new wave of #MeToo: how dare they give a festival venue to a pedophile filmmaker hiding from American justice? Aside from this context, the film seems to be a harmless but apparently unsuccessful old man joke about the “end of the world”; in it it is difficult to discern the handwriting of the former provocateur and ruler of thoughts.

The cream of society from all over the world gathered in a Swiss VIP hotel to celebrate the arrival of the millennium: these cartoon characters are played by both current and retired artists, up to Mickey Rourke. Most memorable is the breathtaking billionaire Arthur William Dallas III (John Cleese) with a young wife of immense thickness, whom he orders as a memorial gift of a living penguin. A group of former beauties defile – victims of plastic surgery; one of them is played by Sidney Rom, who in her youth shone with Polanski in the film What? The team of Russian guests, led by a stern ambassador (Ilya Volokh) and an inveterate bandit (Alexander Petrov), who share the contents of several suitcases brought from Moscow in a boyish way and listen with mixed feelings to the New Year’s Eve speech of the resigning Boris Yeltsin, cannot be denied the colorfulness.

Poor relatives, hotel managers and bank clerks groveling before the powers that be. An escort of single-celled long-legged models accompanying the “Russian delegation”. The chic old woman Marquise (Fanny Ardant), who fed a chihuahua dog with black caviar, whose excrement stinks the entire exclusive hotel. These are the kind of characters and sketches that fill the picture of the “rich-unfortunate” who get drunk, copulate without love, and some go to the other world right on New Year’s Eve, leaving the living to share their innumerable treasures.

Why did Polanski even take up this primitive caricature, clearly unworthy of his talent? I would not be surprised if, despite enemies and enemies – which has always been the principle of his life. In his 90s, he still makes films, albeit not great ones, and it is clear that he enjoys this. Has the right to.