Translated material
Tamed Lions
“Vicious Affair” won in Venice
The main prize of the Venice Film Festival , which closed on Saturday, the Golden Lion for best film, was awarded to director Ang Lee, who two years ago received the same award for the film about gay cowboys Brokeback Mountain. His new film, A Vicious Affair (originally titled Lust, Caution), is set during the Second World War and the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, where a romance unfolds between hunter and hunted: a girl from the Resistance and a member of the collaborator Chinese government whom she must kill . This mixture of spy and erotic thriller was not a favorite of critics, who called the film "mediocre porn." In addition, for some reason everyone was sure that the chairman of the jury, Chinese director Zhang Yimou, would not dare to award the main prize to a “compatriot.” However, despite being Chinese, Ang Lee is from Taiwan and has been living in the United States for a long time, filming transnational film hits - from Sense and Sensibility to Crouching Tiger. The forecasts did not come true, as once happened with “Brokeback Mountain,” which was received by the journalistic festival pool with approximately the same degree of warmth. Moreover, Ang Lee’s film was also awarded for the cinematography of the Mexican Rodrigo Prieto, who shot “Love Bitch,” “Frida,” “The 25th Hour,” “Alexandra,” “Brokeback Mountain” and “Babel.”Nikita Mikhalkov, whose film “12” was shown on the penultimate day of the festival, was awarded the “Special Golden Lion”. The wording of the prize is close to that with which this year Bernardo Bertolucci and Tim Burton were awarded honorary Golden Lions for creative achievements throughout their careers. This special place of Mikhalkov among the winners (“Lev” is golden, but special) seems to emphasize that the phrase “He is Russian, and this explains a lot,” which became the slogan of his “Barber of Siberia,” is universal and can help out in a difficult case even a jury consisting of some directors.
The best actors who received the Volpi Cup were Brad Pitt for his role in Andrew Dominik’s western “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” and Cate Blanchett, who played one of the roles in Todd Haynes’ multi-character film “I’m Not There.” And Haynes himself shared the jury’s special prize with Abdellatif Kechiche (“Couscous with Fish”).
The Silver Lion for Best Director went to veteran American Brian De Palma. The action of his film “Censored”, like in “Vicious Affair”, takes place in an occupied country - only in modern Iraq, in the town of Samarra, whose name immediately refers to the famous parable about how a man tried to escape from death in another city , but it was there that he met her face to face. The plot is this: American soldiers rape a local girl, killing her entire family, and then themselves become victims of revenge. The film was shot on a digital camera and carefully stylized to resemble an amateur video. Judging superficially, De Palma can rather be called a champion in Golden Raspberry nominations, which were awarded to his most famous films (Dressed to Kill, Scarface, The Untouchables, Bonfire of Ambition, Mission to Mars ") than a festival director. Last year his "Black Dahlia" made no impression in Venice. But in this he managed to present something completely consistent with the ethics and aesthetics of big festival cinema. There is anti-war pathos, and trench truth, and the wrongness of both sides involved in the massacre, and the right to revenge, and purges among the local population, and mine explosions, and severed heads, and shocking television reports from the scene, and the Internet, which has also become a battlefield of two civilizations, and videos posted there in which you cannot understand where the frames are falsified and where the reality is. But the main thing is a clear demonstration that any event captured for some purpose turns into manipulation of the audience’s consciousness. Although we have something to relate the plot of the film to - in essence, this is the story of Colonel Budanov, only with an Iraqi accent - it is unlikely that this complex picture will appear in our box office, where any decent film fails with enviable regularity.
As usual, the jury managed to surprise and refute the results of various ratings and bets on the winner. Ang Lee and his “porn” were immediately sent to the trash. If some people called De Palma a potential contender for the director's prize, they still singled out the work of Todd Haynes more. Brad Pitt was dismissed as a nuisance fly, preferring the equally glossy George Clooney in the film “Michael Clayton” and Tommy Lee Jones in the film “In the Valley of Elah.” Even in the film about Jesse James, by all accounts, Pitt was completely outplayed by Casey Affleck, who got the role of the cowardly killer of the famous bandit. However, both Pitt and this picture are most likely not as simple as they seem, since the American mythology of the Western, which states that one man who kills others is worthy of admiration and another of contempt, is here continued in projection - showing how the legend is forged in pop consciousness. Russian journalists liked Nick Cave the most in this film, who at the end of the film came out with a guitar and sang a ballad about Jesse James. But they, with our characteristic patriotism, branded Mikhalkov for spoiling Sidney Lumet’s fifty-year-old masterpiece “12 Angry Men,” although most probably learned about this masterpiece precisely in connection with Mikhalkov’s film.
In the festival betting, the biggest bets were placed on the film “Couscous with Fish” by Tunisian Abdellatif Kechiche, who lives in France. Everything about it satisfied the critical perceptions of the festival's main prize-winner. Firstly, the author is a second generation immigrant who has made a great career in his new homeland. Both of Kechiche's previous films received prizes: Blame it on Voltaire (2000) once won the Lion of the Future at Venice, and The Catch (2003) was the best French film of the year, winning three Césars. Secondly, he glorifies the Arab subculture, which is gradually becoming the brightest national and social color in the European multicultural space. In addition, he makes feature films according to fashionable canons, stealing from documentary cinema the style and pathos of direct observation of the little things in life. In Couscous, an elderly unemployed Arab living in a French port town tries to turn the centerpiece of family feasts into a restaurant business, thus waging a culinary duel with fate. In essence, the people on the screen simply prepare couscous and eat it, somehow sorting out family relationships in between. Of course, such cinema is attractive for its ostentatious ingenuity and skillful manipulation of the leftist consciousness of the audience, who make up the majority of the festival audience. However, a lot of such dishes have been made in recent years, and they have become somewhat boring, becoming a kind of art mainstream. Therefore, the jury gave Kechisha only a special prize, sharing it in addition with Todd Haynes’ film “I’m Not There.”
I'm Not There is, quite true to its title, a film about Bob Dylan without Bob Dylan himself. But there are six people, including Richard Gere, Heath Ledger and Christian Bale, playing his different incarnations (from a teenage tramp to a world celebrity). The picture is more like a charade that can only be solved by fans of Bob Dylan, a musician who has become a cult figure, and those who like to look for quotes and allusions, from which, in fact, this film is built. Naked not to the point of nudity, but to the very guts, the director's technique tells about the living legend not directly, but tangentially and between the lines, freely strolling through history and culture. In my opinion, since the prize was given not for the acting ensemble, but only for Cate Blanchett, it means that the director’s idea was not a success. But whether this can be verified is a big question. So far the picture has not been purchased for our rental.
The Best Screenplay award went to Paul Laverty for his story in Ken Loach's It's a Free World. In the “Horizons” program, the main prize went to the Estonian film “Autumn Ball” by the young director Veiko Õnpuu. The winner of the documentary program was the winner of the Golden Lion at last year's Mostra - Chinese Jia Janke. “Lion of the Future” went to Mexican Rodrigo Pla for the film “The Zone.” The Silver Lion in the short film program was awarded to English actor Paddy Considine, who made his directorial debut. But our Leonid Rybakov with the film “People of Stone” did not go unnoticed - he received a diploma and a special mention from the jury.
The completed Venice Festival was marked by future construction. In 2011, a new festival palace will appear on the island of Lido, where Mostra is suffocating from overcrowding. On this basis, it can be judged that Venice won its battle with the new Roman Festival for government subsidies. Or at least got the lion's share.