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For those few of you that are interested, most of the big name flicks have now debuted at Venice. I'm going to stop posting updates for a couple days but then come back next weekend hopefully to finish the Venice rundown and pick up a couple days into Toronto's festivities.
In the meantime, here's a solid run-down on the Venice happenings as of yet.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/sep/04/venice-film-festival-2011
Maybe it's the prosaic peril of mid-budget film-making, or it could be that many of the early films at Venice have been based on plays, but this has so far been a festival of interiors. I've seen a lot of furniture, trinkets and wallpaper, from Wallis Simpson's dressing table and cocktail shakers to Freud's couch and Jodie Foster's coffee table. In the rooms, people come and go and, while Venice might be an appropriate place to be talking of Michelangelo, they've actually been discussing politics, spies, sex and chaos.
It is always dangerous to divine themes from a collection of disparate films at a festival, but there is a case at Venice, mainly as a result of festival director Marco Mueller's careful curation of the selection. So internalised has the cinema been so far that one might think the world's film-makers have got together to tell us that the world's problems can be solved first by sorting out one's home affairs, that the personal is the political once more.
The best film, and surely the favourite for the Golden Lion, is Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. A clammy and classy adaptation of John Le Carré's novel, it conjures up a lost world of early 1970s London, a film of sealed rooms, Wimpy bars and shadowy Islington houses. These spies have their meetings in leak-proof, smoke-filled Portakabins encased in a vast bunker they call "the circus". The plot hangs on a "rotten apple", a mole in the MI6 system that needs to be weeded out.
Gary Oldman's inscrutable George Smiley studies his suspects: Ciaran Hinds, Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, Benedict Cumberbatch, Mark Strong, Toby Jones, Kathy Burke. It's a mouthwatering cast, and they are all quite brilliant in it. The production design is a marvel, the costumes are perfect, and just how Swedish director Tomas Alfredson got under the skin of British behaviour so intuitively is remarkable. They certainly, er, let the right one in there. I don't think there's a duff note in the whole piece, not even in the choice of Almodóvar's usual composer, Alberto Iglesias, to do the score. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy premieres in Venice on Monday, and if I have been a bit leaky and sneaky in reviewing this excellent film now, then cart me off to Moscow.
George Clooney's The Ides of March, which opened the festival, bears many similarities in terms of chicanery and skullduggery, but is set in the world of American politics. Clooney himself stars as Mike Morris, a liberal candidate whose ideals and looks make him an ideal president but whose path to the top is littered with right-wing smears and power deals. Do you think George is telling us something about Obama?
The political game, conducted in campaign offices, airless hotel rooms and sports bars, doesn't come out of it well, but the film is a good one, based on a stage play, Farragut North, and boasting as good an American cast as Tinker does a British one: Ryan Gosling is terrific as the young spin doctor getting a lesson in hardball from veteran campaigners Paul Giamatti and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Evan Rachel Wood is strong, too, but as happens so often with girls in the clubby, male world of Clooney films, her character doesn't end well.
Claustrophobia is the dominant emotion of Roman Polanski's Carnage, a film he made while technically under house arrest. Based on a Yasmina Reza play, this is a stomach-churning peek into bourgeois life, viewed almost entirely through the keyhole of a tasteful Brooklyn apartment in which Jodie Foster and her husband (John C Reilly) bicker with Christoph Walz and his second wife, played by Kate Winslet.
Their initially civilised conversation, over apple cobbler and coffee, concerns what they should do after Walz's 11-year-old son has hit and wounded Foster's son in a fight in the Brooklyn Bridge Park. Polanski ratchets up the polite tension and barbs until Winslet can take no more and lets fly with an astonishing on-screen "barf" to rival The Exorcist or The Witches of Eastwick.
I was with her. Carnage is like a night at the theatre, full of unbearable people guffawing away, but it is clever, superbly performed in Polanski's slightly stylised manner, and it scratches away at the surface of things – Pinter's weasel under the cocktail cabinet replaced by a pet hamster.
I spent much of Carnage admiring the pictures, coffee-table books and kitchen appliances, all of which contribute perfectly to the atmosphere and theme of the film. Madonna's W.E. is obsessed with jewels and trophies, too, but the Material Girl never really sees beyond the shininess. An hour or so of Madonna's directing goes by quite smoothly. Yes, there's an annoying tendency for dolly shots and jumpy cuts, and stock changes as if someone's given her a box of new toys, but her twin stories – of a young woman, Wally (Abbie Cornish), in 1998 New York obsessed with "the romantic legend" of the affair between Wallis Simpson (Andrea Riseborough) and the Prince of Wales in 1930s England – seem to work for a while.
Cornish wanders around a Sotheby's exhibition that re-creates Simpson's boudoirs and salons, stroking her lockets and cigarette cases, her jewelled crucifixes and Schiaparelli gowns. It's when Riseborough starts appearing to Wally as a ghost on her own soon-to-be auctioned sofa and jabbering "I'll always be here for you" that the film begins unravelling horribly.
It's as if Madonna got good help for half the movie and then an editor quit, presumably in exasperation, telling her to get on with it herself. It's an ego trip, a vanity project, all of the things which work for short bursts of pop but which fatally scupper movies about real people. It looks good but it is self-regarding, chronically lacking in self-awareness and oh-so-painfully vacant.
With creeping horror as the film progresses, you realise Madonna clearly identifies with and admires both a modern woman who is borderline insane and an American woman who came to London and carried off the king. Both are to be pitied, it seems, for being trapped by their wealth and living in gilded cages of their own making.
Weirdly, for a star who gave us the book Sex, Madonna shows no intimate details of what might really have made Edward obsessed enough to give up the throne for a woman who "made the most of what she's got".
At least no actors were harmed in the making of this movie. If the modern-day Wally story is banal and inert, Andrea Riseborough gives it her all as Wallis, like a Joan Crawford impersonator on benzedrine.
Almost as a riposte, David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method gets right in the psyche. Based on Christopher Hampton's play, The Talking Cure, it stars Keira Knightley as Sabina Spielrein, a patient of Michael Fassbender's Carl Jung, in turn a keen follower of Sigmund Freud (played against type by Viggo Mortensen).
The film has a clinical precision to its dialogue yet throbs with repressed desire. It is as ordered and tidy as a Viennese garden on the surface, and Cronenberg, perhaps surprisingly, doesn't unleash the maelstrom within, apart from the odd bit of spanking sex between Knightley and Fassbender.
I liked this strange film, and I liked Keira in it. She juts out her chin so fiercely when playing "mad" at the beginning but smartly tones her performance down to a reposed beauty. If, again, we spend much time with men talking in rooms, at least their conversation is fascinating. I particularly liked that (surely not coincidentally) Jung makes an appointment with Ms Spielrein to "see you next Tuesday".
Out of competition here were two Paris-set pleasures. Lou Ye, the Chinese director, premiered Love and Bruises, featuring Tahar Rahim having lots of sex with a former model, Corinne Yam, as market worker Mathieu and translator Hua respectively. The film has a dizzying, intimate style that is compelling in a mysterious way, a love story so far from cutesy romance that I found it deeply touching and sad. Rahim is as good here as Romain Duris was in The Beat That My Heart Skipped.
American documentary maker Fred Wiseman is expert in the minute observation of the inner workings of institutions. In his latest, Crazy Horse, he revels in the underground "temple of nude chic" that is the titular Paris night spot. His study of breasts, buttocks, artistic endeavour and female power is hypnotic and beautiful.
I was worried for his heart, but the camera remained admirably still throughout, and the 81-year-old director himself seemed perfectly happy at the film's premiere, walking in flanked by two of the dancing girls from the club.
After a career spent examining abattoirs, mental asylums and local government offices, you could hardly blame him.
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