FESTIVAL ROUNDUP



 
 

Venice Film Festival

Even before new director Felice Laudadio was done describing his new, improved film festival at the opening press conference, the same old problems were surfacing in this improbable city. Press passes not ready, inadequate facilities for press releases, and, typically, insufficient seating. This time-honored Venice tradition, which invariably produces the unprogrammed, unlovely spectacle of crowds of complaining critics (and those holding cultural and professional passes) unable to get into screenings despite long waits followed by pushing and shoving, did little to dampen Laudadio's self-congratulatory speechmaking even though an already intensive program precluded additional projections in most cases.

Zhang Yimou's Keep Cool
Granted, Italy is famous for skills other than organization; still, a few unfortunately memorable moments stand out: Zhang Yimou, the internationally famous director of a film in Competition, Keep Cool, unrecognized and unable to find a seat at its public world premiere in the Palazzo del Cinema; and Polish director Jerzy Stuhr being refused admission because he had no pass to the theater where his film, Historie Milosne (Love Stories), also in Competition, was about to receive its second and third awards. Love Stories had already won the prestigious International Federation of Film Critics (Fipresci) prize for Best Film in Competition. (Fipresci also recognized Shane Meadows' Twentyfourseven and gave a special mention to Harmony Korine's Gummo "for bravely going where no man has gone before.")

Laudadio deplored his failure to arrange for a film market at Venice because of lack of time and opposition from a segment of the movie sales business in Italy. He promises a market in Venice next year if appointed again as he is committed to the idea of films as a commodity as well as an art form. This year both the commercial and the arty were in evidence and, while there were the usual big films and big stars to promote them, the indies made an even bigger splash in the lagoon city.

While it may not always be clear, given the creative and convoluted financing of today's film world, what constitutes an independent production, there were many that qualified. Among them were Gummo and Nicholas Barker's Unmade Beds, shown in the Settimana Internazionale della Critica, Jim Jarmusch's The Year of the Horse in Immagini e Musica, Paul Schrader's Affliction in Mezzanotte, Joe Dante's The Second Civil War in Mezzogiorno, and Sarah Kelly's Full Tilt Boogie in the Special Events section.

Europe is in some instances kinder to its independent producers than we are -- Jerzy Stuhr got one-third of his $500,000 budget from the Polish government. For agreeing to film The Informant in the Irish Republic with an all-Irish crew except for himself, the director of photography, and the line producer -- a crew which he says was one of the best he ever worked with -- Jim McBride received $1 million, with additional financing from Showtime. Although the picture is about the troubles in Northern Ireland, McBride had a free hand and believes it was good to have the objective viewpoint of an "outsider." The Informant stays neutral and passes no judgments while dramatically depicting the moral dilemmas of life in Northern Ireland.

Kazuhiro Soda, a young Japanese filmmaker based in New York who was invited to show his 17-minute film The Flicker in the Corto Cortissimo section, was partially financed by grants made through the School of Visual Arts. His short films have been shown at various festivals and his first feature, Freezing Sunlight, was in competition at Sao Paulo in 1996.

Another way to save on salaries is to write, direct and play the four leading roles in your own film. This was done by Jerzy Stuhr in Love Stories. Stuhr, who worked as an actor with famous Polish directors Kieslowski, Wajda, Zanussi, and Holland, directed his first film for television in 1994. Low key, low budget, and aptly named, Love Stories is simple but not simplistic in its thesis of love as the only redemptive force.

Nicholas Barker, anthropologist and photographer who revels in his reputation as "the most sadistic director in British TV" for his commercials, came to New York to film the pseudo-documentary Unmade Beds, calling it his "first foreign-language film" and "an exercise in mendacity." The story of four real New Yorkers trying to connect, Unmade Beds skewers the singles scene. Barker is not surprised that he was rejected by the British film industry ("I am the most presumptuous filmmaker I know. I insist on equal billing with my principal characters.") It took him about 18 months to raise the $1 million budget from the documentary division of the BBC, La Sept/Arte, Cinemax, a small British media company called Baltic, and two of his aunts whom he calls his "Scottish angels" in the credits. Barker was happy to show his film in Venice in opposition to the section called British Renaissance, an idea he calls a complete fiction.

However, British Renaissance showcased some films of merit: Mojo, a finely-crafted film by Jez Butterworth based on his prize-winning play set in a sordid London club in 1958 at the height of rock-and-roll madness, with mesmerizing language and performances; Twentyfour-seven by Shane Meadows; Iain Softley's Wings of the Dove; Philip Savile's Metro-land; and Gilles Mackinnon's Regeneration.

Actor-turned-director Alan Rickman was in Venice for the premiere of The Winter Guest, starring Emma Thompson and her mother Phyllida Law as mother and daughter, which he describes as an indie film. This British entry cost a modest $6 million to produce; no star salaries -- Rickman says Emma Thompson worked for scale because of their relationship -- but 7% to 8% of the budget went to Steve Rundell's digital effects system, Quantel Domino, without which Rickman insists the picture could not have been made, depending as it does on specific weather conditions that do not occur naturally. Perhaps the technology was too successful -- in spite of its fine performances, the movie at times seems frozen and hermetic, focusing as it does on the interaction of four pairs of protagonists to the exclusion of any other character.

The big pictures and the big prizes were on the whole less noteworthy than some of the smaller ones; the fact that 25-year-old Meadows and 23-year-old Korine made it to Venice is almost unprecedented. (There was anticipation for Harmony Korin's Gummo before its arrival and consternation after its screening -- it both repelled and pleased but left no viewers indifferent, the crucial factor perhaps being the age of the audience.) There was a retrospective of films from the 1947 festival and a personal appearance by Malcolm McDowell before a screening of A Clockwork Orange 25 years after it was made, but the themes of this festival -- death, disease, terrorism, alienation -- were very much of our time (as were the off-screen realities of hype, hustle, and hubris).

Two notable exceptions looked back. Vor (The Thief), Russian director Pavel Chukrai's wrenching account of the post-World War II generation in which he grew up, received a UNICEF prize. And Porzus, about a buried chapter of Italian history researched by director Renzo Martinelli, is the story of a group of Italian Catholic partisans massacred by Italian Communist partisans in 1945 (Pier Paolo Pasolini's brother Guido was among those killed). It has opened old wounds, aroused furious debate, and is so controversial that Martinelli says his father has stopped speaking to him.

This time around there were no great cinematic highs in Venice, but its offerings were worthy of respect. So, could the "LIV" before the Venice Film Festival's title stand for Love Involves Victims? Long Interminable Viewings? Less Important Victories? Or is it merely a numeral lent by Rome to Venice for the 54th exemplar? In any case, it was by turns exciting, exasperating, interesting and infuriating -- a perhaps generic definition of a film festival.

Belle N. Burke freelance writer, translator, and traveller lives in New York and Venice.
 
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