Venetian class

Time Out's Venice round-up, featuring new films from David Lynch, Paul Verhoeven and Darren Aronofsky.

Sep 13 2006

'Have you seen 'The Queen' yet?' is a question more expected of the Trooping of the Colour than one of the world's top film festivals. But Her Majesty was the talk of this year's Venice, and rightly so as Helen Mirren's turn as the woman who Private Eye likes to call Brenda is a superb and considered impersonation, and she, co-star Michael Sheen and director Stephen Frears work wonders with Peter Morgan's bold script about the political aftermath of Diana's death. After taking Venice by storm, the film is released in London this week (see review here).

Also playing tricks with history was Paul Verhoeven, whose 'Zwartboek' ('Black Book') is the first Dutch-language film for over 20 years from the director of 'Robocop' and 'Starship Troopers'. Perhaps surprisingly, considering his CV, Verhoeven's film is a complex tale of self-preservation and shifting political allegiances in occupied Holland. The beautiful Carice van Houten is Rachel, a young Jewish woman forced into all sorts of narrative twists-and-turns to survive the war, including sleeping with a high-ranking Nazi (a leap too far for some viewers at Venice). It's gripping stuff, and almost uncomfortably enjoyable considering the Holocaust that lies at its core. Give or take one or two cheap cock jokes ('Is that a gun in your pocket or...') and one comedy Nazi, Verhoeven maintains the thrill of an old-fashioned war movie while staying dramatically and historically credible. He even manages to refer back to his own 'Basic Instinct' during a scene in which Rachel dyes her pubic hair. Old habits die hard.

Emilio Estevez doesn't leap to mind when imagining a promising chronicler of America's past, and on the evidence of 'Bobby', never was an instinct more true. It's one of those films that sounds good on paper: 24 hours in the life of Los Angeles' Ambassador Hotel, leading up to the death of Senator Robert Kennedy who was shot in the hotel's kitchen on June 6 1968. It was a time of war, dissent, dashed ideals; go figure the parallels. Estevez cuts real footage of Kennedy into a drama that focuses on the supporting cast: the doorman, the hotel beautician, the Mexican cooks. His attempt to shoehorn what he sees as the grand themes of the period into a choppy, unsubtle script is embarrassing, and never more so than when he tries – and fails dreadfully – to recreate the experience of an LSD trip. A cameoing celeb cast (Ashton Kutcher, Lindsey Lohan, Sharon Stone, Demi Moore, Anthony Hopkins...) messes up the project further, pushing it into grandstanding territory and making it a film of disjointed sketches. The flaws of 'Bobby' are such that you couldn't care less what RFK has to say as one of his speeches rambles over the hysterical closing scenes. What should feel like a well-honed orchestral recital ends up sounding like a series of poor high-school musical performances (with Kutcher on the recorder).

Thank God for Spike Lee, whose four-hour documentary, 'When The Levees Broke' about the impact of last year's Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans felt like Herodotus in comparsion. The real power of Lee's film lies in its simple and detailed harnessing of the facts. Katrina has long since fallen off the news agenda, yet tens of thousands of Louisianans still remain displaced and unable to claim insurance. Lee's talking-heads, who drive the film along with news footage, are the real deal: a mix of key political and cultural figures, including charismatic Mayor Ray Nagin and Harry Belafonte, and a whole host of locals contribute to this searing oral history. Implicit in Lee's discourse is that Katrina exposed America's ongoing racial and economic inequalities. He doesn't need to stamp his feet in the style of Michael Moore: his story tells itself and, along the way, holds a mirror to modern America.

A world away from war and flood was Barbara Albert's 'Fallen', a wonderful and low-key Austrian film. Five women in their early thirties reunite at the funeral of Michael, a favoured school-teacher whose influence touched them all. Life has dealt them wildly different cards: one's an actress, another's on day-release from jail. Albert follows her ensemble intimately over 24 hours as they mourn, party and reminisce, and her apparent throwaway style belies a sharp photographer's eye. It's a film of subtle psychology and excellent performances.

Boos greeted the end of Darren Aronofsky's 'The Fountain', a flawed and humourless film which redefines the meaning of ambitious. Aronofsky darts between the centuries as a scientist (Hugh Jackman) seeks a cure for his dying wife (Rachel Weisz). One minute, Jackman is playing a Spanish conquistador in the sixteenth century, the next he's floating around in a bubble in the middle of a galaxy in the twenty-sixth century and desperately hugging a tree which holds the secret to eternal life (although critics were divided as to whether its creamy deposit more represented Savlon or semen). It's overblown, bite-your-lip stuff, but there's an attractive, if teenage, simplicity beneath its alienating exterior.

An altogether more cohesive and impressive vision of the future came courtesy of Alfonso Cuaron ('Y Tu Mama Tambien') whose 'Children of Men' is an adaptation of a PD James novel and draws a startling vision of Britain in 2027, an unhappy, paranoid time when Britain is the only surviving nation and a fertility crisis means that no new babies have been born for 18 years. Clive Owen plays Theo, a civil servant who finds himself unwitting guardian to the only pregnant woman on earth. It's a film which could have been ridiculous. In Cuaron's hands, it emerges as some achievement, both technically (look out for a one-shot take late on) and dramatically (the script and performances are tight; even Michael Caine is amusing as a cardigan-wearing, pot-smoking sage). One of the film's striking features is that London in 2027 doesn't look so different from today. A creepy familiarity makes it fascinating and terrifying. Immigration issues give it a striking potency, too.

David Lynch came to Venice with his first film in over five years, and 'Inland Empire' makes 'Mulholland Dr' look like an episode of a daytime soap. Again, there's a nightmare vision of Hollywood at its heart, but this is a darker, even more obscure beast. More Lynchian (ie, confusing, terrifying and sexually and psychologically icky) than anything the director has made, the film stands as one long (three hours) developing nightmare and exists entirely at the level of the subconscious. Frankly, it's hard to watch. Plot is near impossible to decipher. We gather that Laura Dern is an actress employed to make a film with director Jeremy Irons and co-star Justin Theroux, yet the lines between 'reality', the film-within-the-film and her past begin blurred and become indistinguishable. We witness men with donkey-heads. We see wannabe-actresses, all crop tops and fake tits, dancing 'The Locomotion'. Frustrations aside, its mysterious mood is certainly piercing and the film demands a second-viewing – if only to determine what the hell happened the first time round.

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