Frank Mannion seeks out God at an excellent 80th edition of the festival.
The Catholic Church has long played a leading role at the Venice Film Festival. Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, the papal travelogue In Viaggio: The Travels of Pope Francis and Abel Ferrara’s Padre Pio all premiered on the Lido, as did the clerical abuse drama Spotlight, winner of the best picture Oscar 2016. At this year’s edition, Catholicism was often reduced to a cameo in a rich ensemble of world cinema.
This year’s jury was led by the Oscar-winning director of La La Land, Damien Chazelle. He was feted at the festival’s most exclusive soirée at the luxurious Hotel Danieli, with its spectacular lagoon views of the 16th-century Benedictine church San Giorgio Maggiore. VIP guests feasted on a sumptuous menu inspired by the director’s work, including sea bass baked in a lunar crust. Chazelle later announced that Yorgos Lanthimos’ fantastical Poor Things was the winner of the prestigious Golden Lion. Emma Stone plays Ella Baxter, a highly sexed “Frankenwoman” on a crazed coming-of-age journey. We learn that she has been reconstructed and recreated by the monstrous Dr Godwin Baxter (Willem Defoe), whom she calls “God” throughout. It will be released in the UK and Ireland in January next year and is likely to storm the Oscars.
Two films about refugees took major prizes. The harrowing Green Border, from Polish director Agnieszka Holland, follows a Syrian family as it attempts to make it into Poland by transiting through Belarus. They become human pinballs, caught between the violent border guards of both countries. In an impassioned speech as she picked up the special jury prize, Holland admonished European leaders for failing to do more in the refugee crisis, “not because we don’t have the resources, but because we don’t want to”. The film is a damning indictment of European policy. The powerful Io Capitano (Me Captain), from Italian director Mario Garrone, follows a naive young boy (played by the charismatic Senegalese TikTok star Seydou Sarr) as he crosses Africa in an attempt to reach Italy. It was a worthy winner of best director and best young actor, as well as the Signis Prize.
Spiritual pastures are explored in Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Grand Jury Prize winner Evil Does Not Exist. It is a slow-burning Japanese film that looks at the environmental and social consequences for the residents of a bucolic village when an unscrupulous developer plans a glamping site nearby. Tempers simmer and it takes an unexpected dark turn in its final moments. God appears again in the wonderful moving and uplifting French documentary God is a Woman. It uncovers an unreleased and long-lost film by Oscar-winning filmmaker Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau and returns it to Panama’s indigenous Kuna people, who have been waiting over 50 years to see it. The title is a nod to the revered position of women in the Kuna tribe – women own the land and oversee the civil administration, and the tribe view Mother Earth as the creator and provider of all things.
God is also referenced in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla. Elvis is portrayed as a flawed God-fearing Southern gentleman with a violent temper, still grieving the recent death of his mother from which, according to Priscilla, he never recovered. The film shows the start of their courtship when she was only 14. She was still a teenage schoolgirl when she first moved into Elvis’ mansion Graceland. We see Priscilla reluctantly being dropped off at a local Catholic secondary school as Elvis and his entourage continue their bacchanalian pursuits. If the film is to be believed (Priscilla Presley serves as its producer), the couple were chaste until their wedding night. Coppola takes a different approach than Baz Luhrmann’s extravagant Elvis, by relying on Priscilla’s memoir, Elvis and Me. It features a magnetic performance from Jacob Elordi, and newcomer Cailee Spaeny was the deserved best actress winner.
The best screenplay award was won by the Chilean director Pablo Larrain for his soon-to-be-cult vampire classic El Conde (The Count), in which General Pinochet is portrayed as a 250-year-old vampire who is seen licking the blood from Marie Antoinette’s guillotine. Margaret Thatcher makes a vampiric cameo in the film. Pinochet falls in love with a beautiful exorcist-accountant nun Carmencita (Paula Luchsinger), who is sent to audit his soul and accounts. In this allegorical film, it seems that the virginal nun is a cypher for the role of the Catholic Church during Pinochet’s reign, so there is little surprise when she is seduced by the devil himself.
Bradley Cooper’s audaciously directed biopic of Leonard Bernstein, Maestro, left empty-handed. At its centre is the relationship between the bisexual Bernstein, played by Cooper, and his Chilean wife, vivaciously played by Carey Mulligan. Cooper has a large prosthetic nose that was much criticised for Jewish stereotyping, but I did not find it distracting. One of the most powerful scenes is a stirring performance of Bernstein’s Mass. It was originally commissioned by Jackie Kennedy in 1971 and is based on the Tridentine Mass, with the liturgical passages sung mostly in Latin. The sequence culminates with an emotional Bernstein seeking out his estranged wife in the audience for a reconciling embrace.
The Catholic-raised Ava Duvernay became the first African-American director to have a film in competition at the festival with the outstanding Origin. Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent, this scholarly drama follows an academic (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) and her journey in researching a book about caste. Linking the extermination of the Jews in Nazi Germany, abhorrent acts against black people in America and the subjugation of the Dalits in India, the film shows how our lives have been shaped by caste, and how caste is a more suitable term than racism to explain the origins of hate.
The festival took place against the backdrop of the actors and writers’ strike, allowing directors to take a more centre-stage role than usual. The festival was criticised for selecting new films from a trio of directors accused of sexual assault – Roman Polanski with his risible Y2K satire, The Palace; Woody Allen with the Paris-set French language Coup de Chance, a return to form for the 87-year-old director, and Luc Besson with his wild Dogman. God appears in a light-hearted way in Dogman’s opening title card that quotes the French statesman Alphonse de Lamartine: “When man is in trouble, God sends him a dog.”
The late William Friedkin was honoured with a 50th anniversary screening of The Exorcist. Friedkin recently said that he believed “very strongly in God and the power of the human soul” and described The Exorcist as a film “primarily about the mystery of faith”. The 80th edition of the Venice Film Festival provided a re-affirmation of a different kind of faith – faith in the power of the medium of cinema in these challenging times.
Dr Frank Mannion is a film director and academic. Quintessentially Irish, his new film, is released next year.
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