Dark visions at the Venice Film Festival
‘Volatile world’ of modern age reflected in films
The 75th edition of the Venice International Film Festival has elicited keen anticipation for its feast of films by major directors. It is easy to be dazzled by the roll call of auteurs presenting their latest work — from Joel and Ethan Coen to Mike Leigh to Alfonso Cuaron to Mary Harron to Olivier Assayas to Errol Morris. And once again, Damien Chazelle opens the festival, with the astronaut drama First Man, just one year after La La Land began its road to the Oscars.
Many of this year’s filmmakers share visions of worlds in crisis or shattered by violence and turmoil.
Leigh’s Peterloo revisits the 1819 suffrage demonstration that was brutally quashed by the British government. Paul Greengrass’ 22 July re-stages the 2011 terrorist attacks in Norway in which Anders Behring Breivik killed more than 80 people.
Harron’s Charlie Says examines the Charles Manson murders through the lens of his jailed female followers. Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale sets a brutal revenge tale in 1820s Tasmania. Even Cuaron’s Roma, centring on a middle-class family in early 1970s Mexico, includes what is known as the Corpus Christi Massacre.
Many of these films are recreating the past in a reflection of the problems and unrest that loom today. Leigh has never been shy about portraying the class circumstances of the richly realized characters in Mr. Turner, Vera Drake and other films, but Peterloo takes his work in historical drama to another level.
“It’s about the franchise, it’s about education, it’s about people having a voice, and it’s about people with power and wealth and people without power and wealth,” Leigh said. He added that the film’s story arrived at a powder-keg moment in our own century.
“We’re on the edge all the time, aren’t we?” he said. “We’re in a volatile world that we couldn’t have anticipated even 10 years ago.”
Set in a more recent, also volatile era, Charlie Says flashes back to the Manson killings in 1969, viewed from the perspective of followers later in prison reckoning with their actions.
“We didn’t want to overdramatize or heighten the violence, just present what happened in a matter-offact way,” Harron, who also directed American Psycho, wrote in an email. She said she “wanted the murders to be as clumsy, brutal and tragically pointless as they were in real life.”
Several films at Venice do not adapt dramas from history, but these, too, hold the prospect of chaos and violence. Luca Guadagnino follows up Call Me by Your Name with Suspiria, a reworking of the gory 1977 horror classic. Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly star as fraternal assassins in Jacques Audiard’s The Sisters Brothers.
Also set in the Old West, Joel and Ethan Coen’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs tells six stories from the American frontier. And the cult Japanese director Shinya Tsukamoto unleashes a samurai’s saga in Killing.
“This is a trend of contemporary auteur films: the capacity to reflect on contemporary society and the main problems we have to face like violence, migration, democracy and the traditional values that we are used to living with,” Alberto Barbera, director of the festival, said by phone from Venice. “The Coen brothers’ Western, for example, is not just a simple tribute to the genre.”
That unpredictability is part of the appeal of the Venice selection: seeing how the sensibilities of different directors shape and are shaped by their subject matter.
Audiard won a Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2015 for his Paris immigrant drama Dheepan, but in The Sisters Brothers, he adapts a quirky historical novel set in Oregon during the Gold Rush.
“I don’t have a particular affinity for the Westerns that are deemed classics — a world of brutal men, with big ideals that don’t prevent them from killing anything that moves: Indians, bisons, neighbours,” Audiard wrote in an email, explaining his attraction to the tenderness of the story’s brotherly relationship.
Other filmmakers are happy to follow their genre premises wherever they may take them, messages and story morals be damned. S. Craig Zahler premièred Brawl in Cell Block 99 last year at Venice and this year brandishes Dragged Across Concrete, a crime thriller with Mel Gibson, Vince Vaughn and Michael Jai White.
“I’m interested in that kind of story where you’re watching people who are trying to do something good but are doing something bad to get it, or the opposite,” Zahler, who also publishes novels, said.