Venice goldmine

While sex, comedy and the misery of Iraq occupied filmmakers at this year‘s Venice Film Festival, nothing left as much of an impression on Dave Calhoun as the many faces of Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes‘ new movie

By the time I left the Venice Film Festival, nothing had made an impression on me like Todd Haynes’ ‘I’m Not There’, a mad and experimental portrait of Bob Dylan from the director of ‘Velvet Goldmine’ and ‘Far From Heaven’. It’s the first drama ever to have been given the nod by the man himself, and, like Dylan, it’s mercurial, impossible to pin down and manages to get deep under your skin. It was my film of the festival.

You’ll have heard that six actors – Heath Ledger, Ben Whishaw, Christian Bale, Richard Gere, Cate Blanchett and a young African-American called Marcus Carl Franklin – play Dylan in the film. But that’s only half the story. Not only has Haynes chopped Dylan’s life into seven sections (Bale plays him twice, once in the early ’60s, once in his late ’70s Christian gospel period), but he has also crafted a whirlwind of interpretations of the singer-songwriter that range from the almost-literal to the purely symbolic.

And so young Franklin is ‘Woody’, who travels in the box-cars of trains and represents the grip of Woody Guthrie on Dylan, while Gere is a Pat Garrett-type from the late nineteenth century, meant to stand for Dylan’s many retreats from the public. It’s Blanchett who offers the most literal take on Dylan in the mid-’60s as he goes electric and tours Britain. She nails him: the voice, the cheekbones, the attitude, the lot. All this, plus an approach to chronology and storytelling that’s impressionistic and blows the familiar biopic out of the water: just as Van Sant did with ‘Last Days’, Haynes is striving to take screen biography some place else.

There were more English-language films at the festival than usual. Of the British work, ‘Atonement’ had a muted reception among Italian critics at the event’s opening, while Harold Pinter’s stagey reworking of Anthony Shaffer’s ‘Sleuth’, directed by Kenneth Brannagh with Jude Law in the Michael Caine role and Caine following in the footsteps of Olivier, went down better with those who were reading the subtitles. Caine was on committed form, largely acting a rubbish Law off the stylised sets.

Ken Loach was back on the festival scene with ‘It’s a Free World . . .’, a bang up-to-date exploration of the world of immigrant labour in London, with newcomer Kierston Wareing as Angie, a renegade recruitment agent who cuts a swath through the pub courtyards and industrial estates of east London. Loach and writer Paul Laverty draw a telling comparison between a mindless, clawing Angie and her retired father, who, we’re told, held the same job for 30 years. The film is on Channel 4 this month.

A miserable view of the near-future was also the stuff of Penny Woolcock’s well-meant but clumsy ‘Exodus’, an Artangel-Film4 collaboration which gauchely manages to refer to 9/11, fascism, South Africa, Guantánamo, Palestine, Sangatte and other buzz issues, places and events in its loose retelling of the Moses story via a Britain that has succumbed to a right-wing police state and a form of apartheid. It unfolds in a fortified coastal community similar to that seen in last year’s ‘Children of Men’.

The tragedy of Iraq was on the mind of both Brian de Palma and Paul Haggis. The first brought ‘Redacted’ (jargonese for preparing a text for public consumption), a faux-documentary which is a collage of ‘found’ moving-images relating to a real US army company in Samarra, one member of which was convicted last month for the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl. De Palma’s reconstructs episodes from the soldiers’ everyday experiences from a dramatised collection of news reports, security camera footage, internet sites and the film diary of one soldier, Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz), who has ambitions to go to film school. If Salazar’s camera-happy character sounds a little contrived, that’s how it plays. Fly-on-the-wall imagery can give a story an immediacy, but it can also create an air of improvisation or comedy, which isn’t helpful when you’re trying to convey the horror of a street-kidnapping or decapitation. The actors aren’t up to the task and one suspects that De Palma mistook a lack of preparation for the path to realism. Yet there are some sequences – a scene at a checkpoint especially – that are horrific and believable.

If, like me, you disliked ‘Crash’, you may be surprised by Haggis’ ‘In the Valley of the Elah’, a finer film. A sombre drama, it looks at the effect of war on US soldiers from the perspective of the fictional murder of Mike Deerfield, a soldier fresh from Iraq who is killed and chopped up and burnt close to his Tennessee barracks. It takes the whole movie to uncover the truth as the victim’s suspicious father, Hank, played superbly by Tommy Lee Jones as a patriotic veteran, instigates a police procedural. Bar a few flashbacks and one startling testimony, Haggis leaves most of the violence of the war in Iraq to our imagination – a sly and effective tactic.

It wouldn’t be a festival without sex and a little comedy. Ang Lee’s ‘Lust, Caution’ offered the first, and if you thought the sex in ‘Brokeback Mountain’ was minimal, Lee delivers it in spades in this graceful meditation on duty and passion in 1940s Shanghai. There were no laughs in Woody Allen’s melancholic ‘Cassandra’s Dream’, an odd mix of sub-Mike Leigh and sub-Hitchcock set in contemporary London that’s told badly and performed poorly with leads Colin Farrell and Ewan Macgregor looking all at sea as two working-class brothers driven to murder by greed. (Full marks to Sally Hawkins, impressive as ever.)

Laughs are only ever tempered with sadness in the films of Wes Anderson and so it was with ‘The Darjeeling Limited’, co-written with Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzmann and featuring the latter, Owen Wilson and Adrien Brody as three brothers who take to a train in India to find themselves and each other. Preceded by a beautiful, Paris-set and oddly (for Anderson) sexy short-film called ‘Hotel Chevalier’, the main feature is familiar Anderson territory: the sound of The Kinks and the Stones mixed with the music of Satyajit Ray, and the marriage of colour, costume and production-design to create a vivid impression of the real world. It lacks some emotional depth but offers much that’s original and surprising on the well-trodden path of the road movie.