Venice round-up

Dave Calhoun picks his best of the fest, including films featuring a legless Björk and a monkey.

Sep 12 2005

Something stunk at this year's Venice Film Festival – and not just the murky waters of the city's festering canals.

Behind the event's shiny facade – behind Sienna's hair, behind Kirsten's grin, behind Heath's muscles – lurked a bunch of bad, attention-seeking and mostly American movies, diverting attention away from an otherwise fairly decent crop of new work from across the globe.

Which begs the obvious question: are Venice's organisers too quick to compromise on quality in order to lure newsworthy stars to the Lido?

Why else include such jaw-dropping failures as British director John Madden's 'Proof' (Welcome to Venice, Gwyneth Paltrow, Anthony Hopkins and Jake Gyllenhaal!), Terry Gilliam's rambling 'The Brothers Grimm' (Hello, Matt Damon, Heath Ledger and Monica Bellucci!), John Turturro's ill-conceived 'Romance and Cigarettes' (Step inside a gondola, Susan Sarandon and James Gandolfini!) and Cameron Crowe's only faintly amusing and overly sentimental 'Elizabethtown' (Wave to the crowd, Kirsten Dunst and Orlando Bloom!)?

Thankfully, not every film from across the pond was a cock-up. Matthew Barney's two-and-a-quarter hour 'Drawing Restraint 9' is a masterclass in imagination, beauty and bravado, a welcome antidote to all that Hollywood fare.

Previously, artist and film-maker Barney drew on his background in sculpture and performance to make the epic, five-film 'Cremaster' series that culminated in the higher-budget, magisterial 'Cremaster 3', a section of which involved an intoxicating live performance by Barney himself in New York's Guggenheim Museum.

The theatre for 'Drawing Restraint 9' is a Japanese whaling ship; we watch as an on-deck container slowly fills with whale blubber, and Barney and his partner Björk (who wrote the music for the film) carve off each other’s legs and transform into whales.

It's bewildering stuff, but not once does Barney lose grip on a tightly-conceived, almost dialogue-free narrative that embraces ideas of evolution, creation, imprisonment and liberty. Footnotes would smooth the ride (and that's a compliment).

Much more traditional – but no less exciting – is George Clooney's second outing as a writer-director, 'Good Night and Good Luck' (which will screen as the Closing Night Gala of the London Film Festival in early November).

Clooney's moody, black and white film tells of the daring mid-50s TV news show 'See It Now' and its efforts to criticise Senator Joe McCarthy's infamous purge of suspected Communist sympathisers.

David Strathairn is superb as Edward R Murrow, the straight-backed, chain-smoking host and brains behind the show, while McCarthy stars in copious newsreel footage. Smoke and jazz hang in the air.

The mood is serious but never overly grave. And it's hard not to equate McCarthy's paranoid rants with the current President's patriotic obsessions (as is surely Clooney's aim; it's a determinedly one-sided piece of topical historical reconstruction).

Ang Lee's 'Brokeback Mountain' is similarly sensible. Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal head up Lee's sensitive adaptation of E Annie Proulx's novella about two young Wyoming cowboys, Ennis (Ledger) and Jack (Gyllenhaal), who fall in love while herding sheep on a mountainside in the summer of 1963.

The film's early scenes resemble a breathtaking Wrangler advert – wide shots, beautiful landscape, boys in jeans – but the film develops more sagely as the impossibility of Ennis and Jack's love becomes more apparent and their infrequent meetings are punctuated by the pull of marriage and conformity.

Sex and violence collide. Love and anger blur into one. Scenes of actual sex are frustratingly light (the price of mainstream acceptance), but the film remains a love story of the sort rarely told in Hollywood.

Another highlight was Patrice Chereau's devastating 'Gabrielle', which is based on a short story by Joseph Conrad and stars Isabelle Huppert and Pascal Greggory as a married couple in Paris of 1912. Gabrielle (Huppert) and Jean (Gregory) enjoy a stable – if sexless – marriage.

They are wealthy and entertain well; they are popular with friends; they run an efficient household. One evening, Gabrielle leaves Jean a note: she's left him for another and won't be returning. Yet she does return – and within a matter of hours. Chereau examines the fall-out from this trauma with a delicious, claustrophobic intensity. Huppert, as ever, is terrific.

Equally impressive was 'The Constant Gardener', the first English-language film from Brazilian filmmaker Fernando Meirelles ('City of God'). It's a solid and intelligent adaptation of a John Le Carré thriller which displays an unusual respect towards its host country, Kenya.

Turning to the darker regions of the festival, I’m glad I sniffed out 'Pavee Lackeen', an excellent little Irish film that blurs the boundaries between drama and documentary. Photographer Perry Ogden has crafted great performances from a gang of non-actors within the travelling community on the outskirts of Dublin.

The real star is 10-year-old Winnie Maughan as Winnie, a young girl who bunks off school, sniffs petrol, steals from shops and lives with her single-mum in a caravan.

Another hidden pleasure was 'Allegro', the second film from Danish director Christoffer Boe ('Reconstruction'). Boe's film was shot entirely at night on digital and treads the streets of Copenhagen as a young pianist, Zetterstrøm (Ulrich Thomsen) tries to regain control of his damaged memory.

There's always one film that creeps up on you and leaves you wide-eyed in amazement (if not entirely convinced). Here it was the bizarre but smart French oddity 'Carmen', which played to a half-empty screening room one afternoon (presumably because critics fled at the thought of opera).

Natacha Régnier and James Thiérrée play a suburban couple whose lives are upset when Carmen, an intelligent and human-trained bonobo (a species of ape) appears in their bathroom one afternoon and elicits the greatest deadpan line of the festival from Régnier: 'C'est un singe!'

I'll put my reputation on the line here and declare that 'Carmen' marks the finest performance I've ever witnessed by a monkey.

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