Dimenticare Venezia

Bergman's icy world of guilts and repression transposed wholesale to sunnier Italian climes in Brusati's curiously allusive Art Movie (a surprise Oscar contender). An extended family reunion becomes (inevitably) an exorcism of childhood for its reticent participants, two discreetly gay couples spellbound by an operatic matriarch; while the eternal abstracts - sex, death, religion and art - provide a hermetic seal of 'class', only pierced by a few sharp edges of pain and a single shaft of optimism.