The steamboats are always full. The stars and starlets are still shining. The queue for a Campari spritz is almost as long as the one online to book your tickets at 6.45 in the morning, or the one to see Harry Styles on the red carpet. Despite, and probably because of all that, Venice is always Venice, and this year’s film festival’s line-up is doing its best to live up to its promises. While some of the most awaited screenings like Don’t Worry Darling by Olivia Wilde, and In Viaggio by Gianfranco Rosi (the only documentary director in history to have won both a Golden Lion and a Golden Bear) have polarized Lido’s opinion, the two narrative features Love Life by Koji Fukada and Spre Nord by Mihai Mincan, led to a wider consensus. Here are my thoughts.
Don’t Worry Darling by Olivia Wilde
Despite not even competing for the Golden Lion, this 20 million dollar sophomore feature by director Olivia Wilde was maybe one of the most awaited movies of the festival, partially thanks to all the intrigue surrounding its production. A mash-up between The Truman Show by Peter Weir, The Matrix by the Wachowski sisters, and The Stepford Wives by Frank Oz, the film keeps you glued to the seat but makes you go home with a feeling of betrayal. Alice, starred by the always impressive Florence Pugh, “lives the life she deserves” with her beautiful and loving husband Jack (Harry Styles) in the perfect glamorous settlement of the Victory project. This obscure enterprise, led by the villain Frank (Chris Pine), starts getting in between the two lovebirds when Alice begins questioning their existence there. As often happens, when women start rethinking “perfect world,” everything quickly disintegrates. The film seems to pivot for a climatic ascent to the truth that never arrives. The question around which the whole movie evolves — “What is out there in the desert?” — seems as rhetorical as it is confused. Because of some incongruences and some too obvious solutions, in the end, we start doubting: does anyone know what is happening? In an almost comical conclusion, Olivia Wilde, who in the movie plays Bunny, Alice’s best friend, reassures everyone, or at least tries, arguing that she knew “everything”.
In Viaggio by Gianfranco Rosi
The great master of Italian documentary, winner of 2016 Golden Bear with his Fuocoammare, is back with a very unusual on-the-road movie with Pope Francis in the leading role. Sometimes playing the villain sometimes the hero, in his visits across 59 countries between 2014 and 2022, the pontifex maximus elicits controversial feelings. For almost the whole movie, this very rich and powerful man keeps on asking the poorest and most disadvantaged for faith in a better future. Is that Christianity? Or rather Rosi’s irony? In this game of reciprocal complicity with the spectator, the director constrains the impressive selection of archival material by Alessia Partiti in a very repetitive pattern. The grace and cure through which he narrated the Grande Raccordo Anulare, one of Italy’s most hated traffic arteries, in his Sacro Gra, Golden Lion winner in 2013, has been replaced by a more sterile tone. Despite the poetry seemingly gone, Rosi’s typical close-ups of details and landscapes still enchants the viewer by presenting an urbi et orbi glimpse of contemporary society. In Viaggio is in playing out of competition.
Spre Nord by Mihai Mincan
Inspired by a true story, Spre Nord is a philosophical journey that evolves like a western. Dumitru (Nikolai Becker), a Romanian 20-something cowboy-wannabe, is trying to reach “America” at any cost. When Joel (Soliman Cruz), a Christian Filipino sailor discovers him on the Taiwanese cargo ship he works on, two possible scenarios emerge. Let Dumitru be killed by the “bad Taiwanese” or help him together with the other “good Filipinos”. Joel finds the answer in God’s words and decides to protect the young fugitive. This leads to a journey to humanity’s bowels, symbolized by a reverse passage from a claustrophobic underworld to the open sea. What starts as a religious charity proof turns into a quest for survival, where the protagonists are confronted with a very basic, and yet profound, question: is what is good also right? An immersive music landscape reflects the internal thoughts of the actors while creating the language of another living being: the ship. Also, the many idioms contribute to drugging the spectator into the abyss. The sounds of Filipino, Romanian, English, Spanish and Chinese, between which the characters fluidly switch, blend into a new melody, as well as creating an exclusive channel of communication among national communities or with the characters themselves. The production, which, lasted almost 6 years because of Covid-19, and was shot in five locations and three different countries, has already been claimed by the Filipino press as a manifesto of all those men working as sailors. Spre Nord is competing in the section Orizzonti.
Love Life by Koji Fukada
Inspired by the homonymous song recorded in the album “Love Life” by Akiko Yano, this Japanese French drama is an honest delicate fresco of family relationships. What do we do now? This is the disarming simple question that Taeko (Fumino Kimura) poses to her husband Jiro (Kento Nagayama), and the public, towards the end of the movie. In a circular motion, this brings the spectator right back to the beginning, when her child Keita (Tetta Shimada) suddenly died in a domestic accident. But the “we” does not seem able to react to such tragedies, at least not in a coherent way. Love Life is about that, about the inherent loneliness of being human. In the movie, the ambiance and colors emphasize this shift from “we” to “I”. The warm and bright apartment where most of the movie takes place appears reassuring and welcoming in the beginning. But it turns into a hostile environment after Keita’s death, when the shooting slowly moves to other locations. There, each character elaborates on the grief, on their own and in their own way. Love Life is competing in the official selection.
© 2020-2022. UniversalCinema Mag.
Greetings! Very useful advice in this particular post! It is the little changes that make the largest changes. Many thanks for sharing!
Everything is very open with a clear description of the issues. It was really informative. Your website is useful. Thanks for sharing!