Even during the strike in the US film industry, Venice did it again: with the Golden Lion winning film, the festival also offered a preview of the next Oscar awards. You won’t be able to avoid Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Poor Things” there either, just as no one here could escape the intoxicating feeling of being served the wonders of cinema in an overdose. The 141 minutes of this female Frankensteiniade, carried by Emma Stone, who was sentenced to absence because of the strike, fly by. If the festival regulations didn’t preclude further prizes for the Golden Lion winning film, she would have formally forced the actress prize. But Willem Dafoe also plays one of his finest roles as an eccentric scientist. What fantastic detours can art take on the way to truth?
The Greek filmmaker was particularly interested in the feminist perspective of Alasdair Gray’s original. Revived with the brain of her own unborn child, the suicide corpse Bella develops a rebellious perspective on a male-dominated capitalist society.
Set in a parallel world in which the Victorian era has never ceased to exist, Lanthimos juggles the styles of classic cinema: externally a world tour in the splendor of old Hollywood, internally glittering in the rush of images of the avant-garde, which inspires Bella’s insatiable but increasingly critical curiosity illustrated. It took four years for Hollywood to be ready for this venture, Lanthimos explained at the awards ceremony. He was probably referring above all to the sex scenes, which Emma Stone plays with extraordinary openness and dignity.
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Actor awards for Cailee Spaeny and Peter Sarsgaard
The American Cailee Spaeny, awarded the actress award, is the event of Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla”, whose title character she plays in the age range from 14 years to around 33 years. So, despite the unconvincing approach to Elvis Presley, it becomes a story of emancipation, told quietly but with impressive rigor. An American was also named “best male actor”: Peter Sarsgaard, as a widower suffering from dementia, is the haven of calm in Michel Franco’s “Memory” – and an anchor of credibility in a drama overloaded with all sorts of other fates, from alcoholism to child abuse.
Can the same be said for the impeccable performance of the main actor in Matteo Garrone’s migration drama “Io Capitano”? The Senegalese Seydou Sarr, now honored with the Marcello Mastroianni Young Talent Prize, has a fascinating screen presence as a young football fan who finds himself in the hands of smuggler gangs – in the hope of a European playing career. The problems with Garrone’s film, which also won the director’s award, lie in its content and form – in the ignoring of political reasons for escape and the diluting appropriation of African pop culture elements for a more pleasant action drama. All three directing awards were acknowledgment of the power of acting – even if the scripts were not always worth their weight in gold.
The jury, led by Damien Chazelle, chose the most professional from among no less than five Italian entries. Apparently none of them could make up for the absence of Luca Guadagnino’s tennis drama “Challengers”, which had already been set as the opening film – until the production company decided to postpone the start until well into next year due to the strike.
Prizes for Ryu Hamaguchi and Agnieszka Holland
With connoisseurship, the jury also reserved the second and third most important prizes for works of art with extraordinary impact: Ryu Hamaguchi’s “Evil Does not Exist” (Grand Prize) develops from a political social drama about the destruction of nature into a poem of immense interpretive richness. Agnieszka Holland’s “Green Border” (Special Prize) is the most unsparing treatment of the refugee crisis in a feature film. The two and a half hour black and white film finds its central setting in no man’s land between Poland and Belarus, where a young police officer becomes a follower of a murderous pushback policy. In an epilogue to the generous reception of people from Ukraine, the director makes the racism of unequal treatment clear.
“Since 2014, when the refugee crisis began, 60,000 people have died,” warned Holland at the awards ceremony, “and it’s still the same today. People are hiding in forests, robbed of their dignity, and some will die, here in Europe, not because we lack the resources to help them, but because we don’t want that.” And with a look at Italian government representatives in the room: “But it There are also people who help, here and in Poland, because they believe that this is their first duty. We dedicate this prize to you, to all activists from Poland to Lampedusa.”
2023-09-10 18:50:05
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