Illustrations by Maddie Fischer.
The first film I saw on the Lido this year wasn’t a feature but a twenty-minute VR project: Mammary Mountain. Playing in the Venice Immersive sidebar, and directed by Tara Baoth Mooney, Camille C. Baker, and Maf’j Alvarez, it promised an “embodied haptic experience” of breast cancer treatment, as remembered by a few survivors. I’d never worn a VR set before, much less a mammography gown, which was strapped around my chest after a nurse sat me down to explain the procedure and its possible complications. I signed the consent form, followed her into another room, and pressed play. All through the film, a multi-sensorial journey designed to stoke the fantasy of being in someone else’s body, I kept thinking about Roger Ebert’s characterization of cinema as an empathy machine. The voices of chemotherapy patients, discussing their relationship with the illness and its treatment, ricocheted over images of landscapes in turns dreamy and apocalyptic; all the while, the gown’s sensors kept buzzing, vibrating over areas often affected by the disease.
I’m still not sure Mammary Mountain lived up to Ebert’s adage. Anytime the gown buzzed I felt as though I was being pulled out of the story and reminded of all the different planes in which it was unfolding. The elements that should have helped align my point-of-view with someone else’s were having the opposite, distancing effect. I wondered what Ebert would have made of the experience, and VR in general; if he ever thought this was the frontier that would bring us closer to the medium. Perhaps it is. Perhaps sensors and special garments and headsets really are how we can reach that mirage, a telepathic conduit into someone else’s life. But at the risk of sounding like a traditionalist, I remain skeptical.
Familiar Touch (Sarah Friedland, 2024).
Among other reasons, I’m skeptical because of a few other Venice titles that seemed to fulfill that dream without resorting to state-of-the-art technology. Enter Familiar Touch. Sarah Friedland’s feature debut follows an octogenarian, Ruth (Kathleen Chalfant), affected by dementia as she moves into a retirement home and adjusts to daily life there. Where other films about old age have traditionally framed it as a gradual process of disintegration, Friedland’s is the rare one that instead imagines it as a kind of awakening; while cognitive functions deteriorate, other senses intensify.
Friedland, who spent a few years working as a caregiver to New York City artists, has long been interested in the body; her trilogy of shorts, Movement Exercises (2017-2022), revisits choreographies of quotidian activities practiced across domestic, work, and school spaces. Familiar Touch feels like an extension of those earlier projects, concerned as it is with mapping out Ruth’s body and studying the ways in which dementia reconfigures how she responds to her new reality. Like Mammary Mountain, this is a film designed to stimulate all the senses. Touch and hearing take center stage; through static shots, Gabe Elder’s camera singles out gestures through which Ruth renegotiates her role (Patient? Helper? Mother? Child?) in a world that’s slipping away from her. Friedland filmed in an active retirement community in Pasadena, and she favors lambent natural light, a choice that heightens both the warmth of Ruth’s new home—another departure from dementia dramas where these places are routinely cast as antiseptic and lifeless purgatories—as well as a curious temporal rootlessness: it’s as if the whole story unfolded in one long summer afternoon. Save for a couple of songs emanating from radios and speakers, there’s no music to speak of, but Eli Cohn’s sound design draws from diegetic and non-diegetic noises to “expand” Ruth’s character. As sounds and memories collide, backstories are revealed and parceled out through clues and intimations, never big statements.
Friedland and Chalfant’s ability to flesh out Ruth in small increments is the source of Familiar Touch’s power. A sandwich left on the dish rack in the opening moments tells us more about Ruth’s state than words ever could; an awkward interaction at the breakfast table with Steve (H. Jon Benjamin), the middle-aged man who drives her to the retirement home, let us intuit their mother-son relationship long before this is finally spelled out. Which is another way of saying that Familiar Touch extends us the same respect it affords its characters; this isn’t a film interested in connecting the dots as it is in letting us luxuriate in its enigmas, silences, and mysteries. It is also, unlike so many other dramas of its ilk, refreshingly joyful. Chalfant’s performance skirts cheap sentimentality to grant Ruth a rebellious spirit; she won’t let dementia define her, and neither will the film. Throughout, Friedland resorts to humor to offset the seriousness of her situation, yet we never laugh at Ruth, but with her. Both actress and director know how to mine her circumstances for some delightfully surreal moments in a way that doesn’t infantilize her dementia, but rejigs it as a different way of feeling; tragic as it can sometimes be, what’s most remarkable about Familiar Touch is the lust for life it exudes. Together with Alexandra Simpson’s No Sleep Till, Friedland’s was one of the most assured debuts I saw at the festival, and to see it sweep the awards ceremony last Saturday (where it nabbed Best First Feature as well as Best Director and Best Actress in the Orizzonti sidebar) felt kind of cosmic.
The Room Next Door (Pedro Almodóvar, 2024).
The Golden Lion went to Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door, another entry concerned with mortality that only fitfully achieved the same poignancy of Friedland’s. Based on a 2020 novel by Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through, and written by Almodóvar himself, the film stars Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton as Ingrid and Martha; the former a bestselling author, the latter a war correspondent. Old friends who lived and bonded in New York in the 1980s, the duo’s paths intersect again after Ingrid discovers Martha is being treated for cervical cancer. The requisite series of catch-ups ensue, but when Martha’s experimental treatment fails, she turns to the dark web and buys an illegal pill to end it all. She doesn’t want a stranger to find her body, though; when the time is right, she wants to know there’ll be a friend “in the room next door.” That friend is Ingrid, who first balks at the idea (all the more ironic considering she wrote her last book to “better understand death”), and eventually agrees to follow Martha to a lush villa she’s rented upstate and where she intends to swallow the pill.
For a tale powered by that inalienable right to die “on one’s own terms,” The Room Next Door unspools as a long concatenation of debates—about that prerogative, yes, but also more tangential topics like art and writing, and the space those should enjoy on a planet that’s long begun its irreversible collapse. It stands to reason that Almodóvar’s script should be talk-heavy. But the clunkiness of its first act is quite striking. This is… very stilted? I wrote in my notebook twenty minutes in, after a series of flashbacks fleshing out Martha’s past: her romance with a PTSD-riddled Vietnam War veteran who got her pregnant when she was still a teen, her trips around the world’s most terrifying war zones. I haven’t read Nunez’s novel, but there were times when I wondered if the same lines had been cribbed verbatim; so strong is the prose-like flair of some exchanges that The Room Next Door can intermittently suggest the written word on the page.
I don’t know whether to chalk this up to language barriers; the same effect can be felt in some of the director’s Spanish-language projects, too. Then again, Almodóvar has often spoken about his commitment to the “authenticity of the artifice.” Like Fassbinder, he got his start in theater, and his films have a way of treating the world as a proscenium; to fault his latest for being too “theatrical” would be to miss the point entirely, and to gloss over the way Swinton and Moore can so seamlessly elevate it to a realm that transcends its melodrama trappings. Indeed, The Room Next Door is so enthralled by its leads as to appear more interested in showcasing their craft than in fleshing out some of its cardinal themes. Understandably so. Swinton’s no-nonsense attitude steers Martha clear of trite, cancer-drama tropes, while Moore’s Ingrid brings a rush of energy into her life. They both need and complete each other; by the end, the synergy the two actresses strike up makes their bond all the more authentic. “You can’t go around telling people there’s no hope,” Ingrid chides a former lover played by John Turturro. Uttered by another performer, the line would have landed with a thud. But coming from Moore, it becomes a heartfelt précis of the film’s spirit.
Almodóvar wears his cinephilia on his sleeves—here as in several of his older projects, there are trips to the cinema, post-screening chats, movie posters hanging on the walls. Yet The Room Next Door isn’t haunted by a film, but a short story over a hundred years old, James Joyce’s The Dead. So obsessed is Martha with the text, she’s memorized the ending; when Ingrid suggests a movie night, she readily hands her a DVD of John Huston’s 1987 adaptation. But there’s another film we see the two watch together, one that includes allusions to Joyce’s text: Roberto Rossellini’s Journey to Italy (1954), in which a married couple (Mr. and Mrs. Joyce, incidentally) power through soul-baring revelations culled straight from the writer’s text. Speaking of his film’s sepulchral atmospheres, Rossellini said that death traversed Journey to Italy “as a living thing.” Which is a great way of thinking about Almodóvar’s latest, too.
Funereal as its moods may be, The Room Next Door is nonetheless alive to the beauty of the world that surrounds its leads. Shot by Eduard Grau, it boasts the garish, brash look that’s become synonymous with Almodóvar’s productions, with gorgeously curated rooms and wardrobes that teem with lurid and pastel shades, artworks, books, and paintings. But that beauty has an ethical import as well: it takes on an intensity that can only be called life-affirming. Death is exorcised through words and colors, through Ingrid and Martha’s difficult chats as well as Inbal Weinberg’s rich production design. Hardly one of the director’s most indelible, and not a patch on Pain and Glory (2019), another meditation on the way our bodies betray us, The Room Next Door nonetheless arrives at a finale of stupefying grace.
April (Dea Kulumbegashvili, 2024).
Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April ends on a similar note, though in a roundabout way. Much like her first film, Beginning, her second is perched somewhere between the secular and the spiritual, at once supernatural and earthbound, as in tune with atrocity as it is with brief moments of awe. Ia Sukhitashvili, the lead in Beginning, plays Nina, an expert obstetrician who moonlights as an illegal abortionist in Georgia’s rural heartland. Hers is the story of a persecution; after a delivery goes wrong and a newborn dies under her supervision, her bosses at the hospital launch an inquiry that threatens to reveal her pro-bono abortions in nearby villages. Like its predecessor, April is a grim affair—almost punitively so—but its morbid atmosphere is undercut by Kulumbegashvili’s ability to locate wonder in these desolate settings. This fertile tension between the magical and the macabre doesn’t just power the film; it winds up shaping its grammar. Kulumbegashvili is a great practitioner of the long take; in both April and Beginning, her cinematographer, Arseni Khachaturan, traffics in long, uninterrupted shots. But these choices don’t register as nods to this or that cinematic influence so much as evidence of the director’s trust in the camera and its capacity to convey the unspeakable.
Beginning’s most spell-binding segment, in my book, was a five-minute shot of Sukhitashvili’s character, Yana, laying on a bed of fallen leaves; eyes shut, face frozen in a beatific smile, it was the closest her character ever got to an escape. The scene lets us see her experience an epiphany, a small miracle; at its most entrancing, April lets us experience one ourselves. Credit for that goes to Khachaturan’s handheld camerawork and Kulumbegashvili’s masterful use of offscreen space. Here too, the director frames some of the most harrowing exchanges through medium shots in which characters look at the camera as they speak to each other; when these are Nina’s interlocutors, the decision aligns our point-of-view with hers. In a tale that straddles facts and dreams, the effect is especially unsettling. April opens with a glimpse of a humanoid shrouded in darkness, its face an unrecognizable mask of flesh. Neither human nor alien, it traverses the film like a shadow, roaming Nina’s flat, sitting at her desk, sleeping in her bed. Who is it to her, exactly? Kulumbegashvili doesn’t answer; tempting as it may be to peg the creature as a manifestation of the OB-GYN trying to keep her secret work under wraps, especially in a society so prone to chastise it as an abomination, April doesn’t deal in facile metaphors. Instead of explaining them away, it relishes in all its visions, shedding its harsh realism to arrive at a realm that’s far more difficult to define. I couldn’t put into words the jolt I felt as a crane shot lifted me from a poppy field to contemplate an apocalyptic hailstorm fast approaching in the background; April radiates this power throughout, juxtaposing Nina’s unflinchingly bleak routine with moments of sudden expanse that approximate something close to the sublime. This is the work of a filmmaker in full control of their medium, an artist firmly convinced of cinema’s ability to surprise and mesmerize.
The Brutalist (Brady Corbet, 2024).
The only other official competition entry to achieve anything close to that this year was Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, a film that pre-premiere publicity had celebrated as a kind of anachronistic dream project. Shot entirely on VistaVision and spanning three and a half hours—with a fifteen-minute intermission—The Brutalist was indeed designed, per its writer-director’s admission, to sponge something of the Hollywood epics from the 1940s and 1950s, the decades in which most of it takes place. Corbet is no stranger to celluloid; his first two features, The Childhood of a Leader (2015) and Vox Lux (2018), were shot on film. But if there’s any meaningful reason why his third really is an untimely oddity, that’s neither its length nor its format (can one really be shocked by a three-hour-plus behemoth when so many big prestige pictures these days hit similar running times?). Rather, it’s Corbet’s unwavering faith in cinema’s power to yield a sweeping spectacle, a 21st-century take on those old CinemaScope epics, with stunning vistas, a titanic scope, and deliberate pace. Granted, he’s not the only director working with that maximalist, grand-scale approach—a proclivity he shares with the likes of Christopher Nolan, Paul Thomas Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, and Denis Villeneuve, to name a few. But the effortlessness The Brutalist exudes is entirely his own. Corbet’s dedication to craft is impressive; he knows his stuff, but he also doesn’t seem particularly interested in making sure we know that he does. His style doesn’t draw attention to itself, and that lightness of touch can make the film soar.
At its center is László Tóth (Adrian Brody), a Jewish Hungarian architect and Holocaust survivor whom Corbet follows as he flees war-torn Europe for the States, where he wrestles with the myth of the American Dream and the limits of his own hubris. Hired to renovate the library of a Mr. Van Buren, a Jay Gatsby type played by Guy Pearce, László is talented enough to convince the affluent patron to entrust him with the construction of something much larger: a gigantic community center that will serve as a church, gym, and library—a Fitzcarraldo-like feat to which The Brutalist devotes its entire second part.
In keeping with László’s, the film’s ambitions are immense. Corbet, who wrote it with Mona Fastvold, his recurring co-writer and partner, fills it with a pantheon of supporting characters and big ideas: about architecture, about war, about the way art can survive the corrosive effects of politics and ideology. The Brutalist’s geographical reach is no less vast: we bolt from Europe to New York to Pennsylvania and then back to Europe, where László and Van Buren inspect the marble quarries around Carrara, Italy, to find the best blocks to bring home. Their fastidious, almost reverential attention to the work echoes Corbet’s. In a film where characters constantly philosophize and pontificate on all things architecture, The Brutalist captures the latter as a process, as actual, hard toil. What’s most remarkable about it isn’t all the time Corbet devotes to the building of a library, say—not to mention the lengths it goes to document the completion of Van Buren’s center. It’s that the design and construction of these spaces take on the urgency of a thriller, and the catharsis of a revelation. That Corbet can make such a muscular story feel so nimble is nothing short of astonishing.
After the festival’s embargo on reviews and social media reactions was lifted, I read many comparing The Brutalist to Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007), another scathing foray into the greed that’s coursed through American history. But the similarities only hold up to a point. Even at their most transcendental, Anderson’s works can hardly hide the exertion required to conjure that; The Brutalist, in turn, makes its most otherworldly moments feel almost effortless. I left the premiere rejuvenated, and recognized the same feelings in those who milled about the Sala Darsena. The audience had saluted the film with an ovation and now stood in chatty clusters to keep the excitement alive. It was the kind of experience that justified the whole trip, but I didn’t know how to describe it yet. I still don’t think I do. But I do remember the feeling I carried home that night and have been nursing since: a strange joy that made it difficult to fall asleep.
Read all of our fall 2024 festival coverage here.