Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros (Frederick Wiseman, 2023).
Industry nerves were jangling back in July when the ongoing strikes by the actors’ and writers’ guilds saw Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers pulled from its opening night slot at the 80th Venice Film Festival. The loss of a high-profile premiere with the film’s star Zendaya in attendance must have flustered red carpet reporters and festival bosses alike: those for whom newsworthiness and movie-star magic are inextricably linked. As the festival itself drew near, it began to look like the spotlight was turning towards the filmmakers—and perhaps even the films themselves.
It was hard to keep track, in the weeks leading up to the festival, of which films had received the exemptions from their respective guilds that would allow talent to attend, but for my first full day on the Lido, it certainly looked like business as usual. Over there was Adam Driver, who, from the right vantage point, was tall enough to be spied above the throngs of star-famished photographers. And over there, apparently, was Caleb Landry-Jones, who wasn’t.
As the week wore on, the exempted star appearances came in fits and starts, and were best identified by their accompanying crowds and the extended time it took to walk from one screening room to another. More than five minutes? That’ll be the Priscilla premiere, congesting the thoroughfare with tip-toeing tweens, aflutter from their glimpse of Jacob Elordi’s ear. Or perhaps a protest, objecting to the presence of one director or another. It wasn’t always easy to identify the target of a given demonstration, but with the festival appearing to collect alleged sex offenders by the day, it increasingly seemed that the protestors had formed their own unofficial sidebar that could also lay claim to the name Critics’ Week.
Portrait of Gina (Orson Welles, 1958).
With its star-wattage dimmed, Venice turned to icons of its glamorous past to generate headlines. It was hard to escape coverage of Sophia Loren’s arrival on Italian television, or the festival’s pre-opening dedication to Gina Lollobrigida, who died in January. The latter was the subject of Portrait of Gina (1958), a short documentary by Orson Welles, made for American television but never aired. Its selection for the Venice Classics strand—and such a high-profile pre-opening slot—proved an amusingly strange choice for this festival.
In the film, Welles doesn’t appear to like Italy very much. He begins the 27-minute travelogue with a lascivious glint, extolling the virtues of Italian women, who “dauntlessly continue to raise an ever-fresh standard of improbability in silhouettes.” It’s a short minute until he’s puffing on his cigar throwing sly digs at the nation’s cultural inferiority to America. Pottering around Italy with a look of barely-masked contempt, Welles wrangles various local stars to dish the dirt on the philistinism of the Italian people while impishly abjuring himself of blame: “I’m not going to say anything of the sort… I like to avoid international incidents.”
Traveling to Lollobrigida’s birthplace, the “sad, empty-looking” mountain village of Subiaco, Welles bemoans its “not very nice” inhabitants and lack of beauties. He can’t seem to get out of there quickly enough. “Fifteen hundred years ago,” Welles solemnly intones in his inimitable baritone, “history took leave of Subiaco, never to return. We'll take our cue from history.”
Lollobrigida herself only appears for a few minutes at the end, in what would be her first appearance on television. “Are you going to die in misery and poverty?” Welles asks, having quizzed her on her income tax arrangements. Portrait of Gina would effectively end Welles’s short-lived flirtation with American television—which did produce one outstanding work in The Fountain of Youth (1956). The Biennale’s official description of the film as “foreshadowing the style of his late masterpiece F for Fake (1973)” proves wide of the mark; the short’s sneering tone a far cry from the later feature’s twinkling magic. Welles seemingly agreed, abandoning the film’s reels at the Ritz Hotel in Paris where they languished in lost property through to the 1980s. If little else, the film’s restoration did speak to the rude health of the Welles industry in 2023, when even such a slim slice of marginalia can still command such a notable berth.
Ferrari (Michael Mann, 2023).
It was easy to wonder what Orson Welles might have made of an official selection overburdened with high-profile auteurs and their portraits of male greatness. A noted fan of John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939), perhaps he’d have enjoyed the kineticism—not to mention the independent resourcefulness—of Michael Mann’s latest. One of the most eagerly anticipated films of the year, Ferrari marked the Chicagoan’s return to the big screen following an eight-year absence. Given it feels more of a piece with Mann’s ’90s work, it’s notable that he had been circling this project for some 30 years (the film’s credited writer, Troy Kennedy Martin, died in 2009). While Ali (2001), the filmmaker’s previous biopic, signaled the dawn of his deeply rewarding experiments with the aesthetic possibilities of digital filmmaking, Ferrari—shot digitally but eschewing the singular impressionistic flair that characterized his work from Collateral (2004) through to Blackhat (2015)—resembles something of a reset. It had me thinking back to a first viewing of Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life (2019), a fine film whose return to more traditional narrative methods struck a chord of loss following a decade of dazzling formal discoveries.
A Hidden Life (or perhaps, A Hidden Wife) would have made for a fitting alternative title for Ferrari’s coupling of Hawksian you’re-only-as-good-as-the-job-you-do antics and wounding familial drama. Taking place over a few months in 1957, the film opens on a marriage in ruins. With Ferrari (Adam Driver) barely able to maintain the demands of a business on the brink of collapse, a wife (Penélope Cruz) in mourning for the death of her son, and a mistress angling for acknowledgement of her illegitimate child, attention turns to the forthcoming “Mille Miglia,” a hazardous thousand-mile race across Italy with the potential to reverse the company’s fortunes.
Driver’s dolorously imposing Enzo Ferrari fits neatly into Mann’s career-long parade of—to borrow a description from Thief (1981)—“regular high-line pros,” men for whom the disciplines of craft supersede all else. “I must have total control,” he says early on, establishing his non-negotiable code of conduct. One doesn’t need to look hard to find a kinship between the title character’s infatuation with the aesthetics of form and the interests of the film’s tech-savvy director in the vertices of design and function. As Ferrari pores over the blueprints of an engine, explaining the role of a given curve to his young son, his dialogue belongs as much to Mann as to himself: “If something works better, usually it is more beautiful to the eye.”
Ferrari certainly doesn’t want for beauty, as much in the earthen domestic interiors of its marital agonies as in its jaw-dropping raceway assaults. It’s a film that examines the tensions between emotion and detachment; a melodrama about “men with a brutal determination to win”—and the women they leave behind—that ultimately trades, not in triumph, but in grief, trauma, obsession, and loss.
The Killer (David Fincher, 2023).
A protagonist’s need for “total control” was shared by another high-profile competition entry, a film which feels especially ripe for auteurist readings. “Execution is everything,” read the tag line for David Fincher’s The Killer on posters which dotted the sidewalks of the Lido. Beyond their relationship to this particular film, surely these were the mots justes for characterizing the work of a filmmaker who, with the likes of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011) and Gone Girl (2014), has proven himself adept at elevating even the hokiest of pulp fiction through sheer force of style.
With Fincher having spent almost a decade away from big-screen genre territory for personal reasons, The Killer promised something of a rebound, a point underscored by the return of screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker for their first collaboration since Seven (1995). The film’s standalone credits sequence certainly sounded an echo of the duo’s earlier hit—and Fincher’s erstwhile-adman pizazz—as a pair of giallo-gloved hands readied the hitman’s tools of the trade. Beginning à la Murder by Contract (1958) with the lone wolf waxing philosophical on his personal and professional operating procedures, The Killer at first seems content to follow a tried and tested narrative path. If “Zen-like hitman botches a job, then compromises himself to deal with the fallout” doesn’t presume to bring anything new to the genre melting pot, then “execution is everything” suddenly has a lot riding on it.
While Fincher still can’t resist a showy digital transition—dissolving here between Google Maps overlays and drone shots—the strength of The Killer’s “execution,” for the most part, lies in its restraint. An ongoing bit revolves around Michael Fassbender’s heart-monitoring smart watch (a low heart-rate is ideal for executing a critical hit), a leitmotif echoed in Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s pulsating score. Fincher matches the vascular discipline of his protagonist, hitting a point of dramatic tension early as a job goes awry before letting it hang in the air like an unresolved chord. It’s quite the feat of directorial brinkmanship, to maintain a level of suspense whereby anything could happen at a given moment, but mostly, and agreeably—bar a thunderous mid-film fight sequence—doesn’t.
Much like Fight Club (1999)—a film whose circuitous internal monologue is mirrored in The Killer’s insistent voiceover—this hyper-contemporary thriller deals in ego, hubris, and capitalist anxiety. Fincher doesn’t elide his protagonist’s conspicuous sociopathy, but it’s easy to sense a certain admiration for the containment of his one-man operation. Unusually, this is the filmmaker’s fourth major production for Netflix—following House of Cards (2013), Mindhunter, (2017), and Mank (2020)—a company hardly renowned for fostering lasting relationships with top-level talent. If the studio humored him with Mank, you’ve got to wonder whether this return to his genre métier was compelled as a result of that film’s less-than-golden reception. For a director like Fincher, infamous for shooting numerous takes and firing cinematographers mid-shoot, it’s fun to think of the auto-therapy at play in the film’s exegeses on the limits of control. With The Killer, he has made a film that examines the tensions between creative independence and corporate servitude, illuminating a professional world in which a fastidious approach to craft will only get you so far. Fincher knows as well as his assassin that if you want to maintain control, you’ve got to execute that critical hit.
Coup de Chance (Woody Allen, 2023).
Getting away with murder proved to be a common theme both in and out of the main competition. Woody Allen found himself on the receiving end of his best notices in years with Coup de Chance, a frothy, Dostoyevskian morality play in the vein of Match Point (2005), Cassandra’s Dream (2007), and Irrational Man (2015). With the director himself present at the festival, it was interesting to see the disparities between the receptions granted to Allen and his film. At the morning press screening, the audience erupted into spontaneous applause as his name appeared on screen in that familiar Windsor typeface, while later that evening, demonstrations erupted outside the official premiere, with protestors attempting to storm the red carpet.
It’s been dispiriting, to say the least, for those of us who saw Allen’s work of the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s as foundational texts in our burgeoning cinephilia, to hear dialogue in his post-millennium output that seemed to evince an unreported head injury. Shooting the Paris-set Coup de Chance entirely in French covers a multitude of sins, at least to the ears of a non-native speaker. In his fifth collaboration with Allen, Vittorio Storaro is back on lensing duties, pushing the autumnal warmth of the image until every scene appears to take place under an eternal halogen sunset.
Working from his most tightly structured screenplay in years, Allen playfully marshals another roundelay with one of his most cherished themes: the hands dealt by fate (the film’s title was subtitled as Stroke of Luck). Describing its narrative machinations would be to deny the small pleasures of Allen’s zippy plotting. It’s a trinket, and no Crimes and Misdemeanors (1986), but not without flashes of the nostalgic comforts of the Woody of old.
If it’s anyone’s guess as to whether the positive reviews will aid Coup de Chance in receiving proper US or UK distribution—the last Allen film to get a limited U.S. theatrical release was Wonder Wheel back in 2017—its hopes remain infinitely better than those of Roman Polanski’s latest, The Palace.
Even forearmed with a certain hangdog fondness for the likes of The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967) and Pirates (1986), getting on board with The Palace feels like a big ask. A ribald comedy set amid the ballrooms and bedrooms of a luxury hotel in Gstaad on the eve of the millennium, the film bills itself as a “satire on the lives of the rich and beautiful.” This isn’t entirely new territory for Polanski, whose 1972 film What? similarly goofed around its opulent location with a Mastroianni-led gaggle of the extravagantly well-to-do.
The Palace (Roman Polanski, 2023).
I thought I’d return to my notes in a bid to piece together a synopsis. But transcribing a section as initially scribbled in the dark of the auditorium probably gives a better flavor of both narrative and tone:
“Porn star. Russian gangsters. Plastic surgeon. Mickey Rourke. John Cleese and obese wife. A penguin. A dog with diarrhea. A dog with a vibrator. Weekend at Bernie’s. Caviar. Vomit. Mambo No. 5. Dog fucking the penguin.”
With Jerzy Skolimowski on co-screenwriting duties—reuniting with Polanski for the first time since Knife in the Water (1962)—on paper, at least, The Palace has some artistic weight behind it, and there’s certainly some skill leveraged in keeping the film’s various plates spinning. It may want for a narrative destination—a diabolical climax that could give Triangle of Sadness’s (2022) central set piece a run for its money—but Polanski can still make the most of a single location like few else. Crass, asinine, and often very funny, for better or worse The Palace can at least lay claim to the most unforgettable final image of the 2023 Biennale.
Having turned 90 this year, it would be easy to think that Roman Polanski was the oldest filmmaker presenting his latest work in Venice (he wasn’t there himself, for reasons). But such assumptions are dashed in the presence of Frederick Wiseman: 93 years young and on the Lido in person with his wonderful Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros.
While I’m sure we all share the same hope that Wiseman has another film or two left in the tank, this joyous paean to artisanship and pleasure would stand as a beautiful coda to his unparalleled career. Despite its four-hour running time, Menus-Plaisirs is a smaller film than its sprawling, institutionally-oriented forebears, or at least one more acute in its perspective. Homing in on the everyday artistry of the Troisgros family, whose La Colline du Colombier restaurant in the Loire Valley has held onto its three Michelin stars across 53 years, Wiseman forgoes his usual clerical curiosity to foreground the harmonic rhythms of the gastronomic workflow.
Much like his two ballet films, you can sense Wiseman’s particular love for his subject matter—and his subjects—here. Filmed at a time when the restaurant’s paterfamilias, Michel, is preparing to pass the torch onto the next generation of Troisgros, Menus-Plaisirs evolves from a film about process and creative collaboration into one about legacy and tradition. It was particularly moving to see Wiseman take his bows as the screening drew to a close. I can’t have been the only one to walk out in awe of the creative legacy of one of the great American filmmakers.
Jungle Holocaust (Ruggero Deodato, 1977).
It wasn’t all fine dining on the Biennale’s cinematic menu. Paying tribute to Italian mondo maestro Ruggero Deodato, who died last December, the Venice Classics sidebar programmed a breakfast screening of Jungle Holocaust (1977). Restored in 4K as part of Nicolas Winding Refn’s ongoing project to revive forgotten cult movies, there was certainly an uncanny tension between the newly pristine image and Deodato’s incomparable eye for sweaty, rancid spectacle.
Jungle Holocaust has always lived in the shadow of its more famous (or rather, infamous) offspring Cannibal Holocaust (1980). It’s every bit the dry run for the later film; from its opening faux-docudramatic title card—“the described rituals and events are all true and were actually experienced by the protagonist”—to its penchant for animal cruelty (the horrific sight of a crocodile skinned and fileted alive effectively ensures this restoration will never see a UK release in its complete form). If it can’t quite match the elegiac nihilism of Cannibal Holocaust—or that film’s hauntingly wistful score—the earlier film makes a better argument for Deodato’s command of beauty amid the madness. Jungle Holocaust effectively kicked off the cannibal-movie subgenre of Italian exploitation. Multitudes followed, but few can lay claim to images as forbiddingly bewitching as those Deodato pulls from the cascading tunnel of light which floods the natives’ cavernous lair.
There were echoes of another horror classic to be found in Poor Things, which ventured into the Gothic canon—via Alasdair Gray’s marvelous 1992 source novel—for a rambunctious take on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Already one of the year’s most enthusiastically reviewed films, Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest took Venice’s top prize, the Golden Lion, and seems set to feature heavily in awards season over the coming months. There was certainly fun to be had with this sprawling steampunk epic, especially in its early stretches, not least due to an ingenuous lead performance from Emma Stone. But it seems Lanthimos took Gray at his word in the author’s introduction to his novel—“Readers who want nothing but a good story plainly told should go at once to the main part of the book”—eschewing the Scottish icon’s literary dexterity, from its cast of unreliable narrators to its adroit pastiche of the conventions of the Victorian novel. In adopting the perspective of Bella—the resurrected suicide implanted with the brain of her unborn child—we’re introduced to Lanthimos’s ornate world almost entirely through her eyes, numbing Gray’s piercing satire of the male ego, and of man’s ability to conceive of women only in terms that relate to them. Poor Things the movie opts for a straightforward tale of female empowerment and patriarchal oppression, its thematic concerns repeatedly writ large across the busy surfaces of Lanthimos’s images.
Maestro (Bradley Cooper, 2023).
Poor Things wasn’t the only film in Venice to channel Frankenstein. Following his directorial debut A Star is Born (2018), Bradley Cooper once again resurrects the lifeless corpse of a going-nowhere project originally intended for other filmmakers. Rescued by Cooper from production limbo, the earlier film was originally set for Clint Eastwood, while Maestro—his Leonard Bernstein biopic which screened in the main competition—was circled at one time or another by Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg. For an actor-director who clearly smarts from his failure to secure a Best Director nod off the back of A Star is Born, his ongoing pursuit of projects first betrothed to the industry’s elder statesmen reads like a calculated bid for artistic weight.
Stylistically speaking, Cooper throws everything he’s got at Maestro. If he’s not flipping between black and white and color, he’s dancing with his camera like a part-time Spielberg tribute act. An early sequence, that swoops from the rafters of Carnegie Hall to the stage below, perhaps hints at some Spielbergian mentoring (like Scorsese, Spielberg retains a producer credit on the film). But the scene in question feels incongruous with the rest of the picture. Individual scenes are directed to death—and performed to the rafters—but always in service of themselves, not the cohesive whole.
Tom Wolfe’s vicious 1970 essay “Radical Chic”—about a party that Bernstein and his wife held for the Black Panthers in their Manhattan apartment—proves there are thought-provoking stories to be told about the composer/conductor and his 5th Avenue coterie of “limousine liberals.” Cooper is more interested in the vagaries of Bernstein’s personal life, equating his conflicted sexuality with the burdensome complexities that make a genius.
There’s little here to tell us why Bernstein was one of the great American conductors of the 20th century. The creative process has always been a hard thing to get up on the screen, but Cooper barely tries. Only a late scene, as Bernstein instructs a class of conductors-in-training, hints at more interesting portraiture. But this seems to be par for the course for Cooper’s directorial ambitions thus far. When we first hear the hit song “Shallow” in A Star is Born, Lady Gaga is belting out a couple of lines in a parking lot. The next time we hear it is on stage in a full arrangement, a testament to her mentor's musicianship. The work between those moments is missing in action, much as it is here. Portraits of male virtuosos weren’t in short supply at this year’s Biennale. Yet among the handful of films that elucidated the craft and toil behind their respective subjects’ brilliance, Maestro was the only one with a title that had to be taken for granted.