Controversial Polanski wins prize
“JOKER,” a daring take on the comic book villain starring Joaquin Phoenix, won the Golden Lion for best film at the Venice film festival on Saturday with Roman Polanski controversially taking the second prize.
It is the first superhero film ever to get this kind of arthouse kudos and could now be on its way to Oscar glory.
The last two Venice winners — “Roma” and “The Shape of Water” — have gone on to lift the best picture Academy Award.
US director Todd Phillips paid tribute to Phoenix’s intense performance, saying he was “the fiercest, bravest and most openminded lion that I know.”
“Thank you for trusting me with your insane talents,” he said.
The movie, which The Guardian had described as “one of the boldest Hollywood productions for some time,” has already sparked a heated debate. And there were audible gasps when French-Polish director Polanski — a pariah in Hollywood after his rape conviction — was handed the Grand Prix second prize for his Dreyfus Affair drama, “An Officer and a Spy.”
Within hours of the “Joker” premiere, some warned that Phoenix’s full-throttle portrait of a needy, embittered clown who lives with his mother could empower incels (or involuntary celibates) — the angry, misogynist young men who have been blamed for so much farright and white supremacist violence. Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson worried that it was “exhilarating in the most prurient of ways, a snuff film about the death of order, about the rot of a governing ethos.”
He feared that it “may be irresponsible propaganda for the very men it pathologises.”
But most critics disagreed, with Variety’s Owen Gleiberman saying Phoenix has remade Batman’s arch-enemy as a “Method psycho, a troublemaker so intense in his cuckoo hostility that even as you’re gawking at his violence, you still feel his pain.”
Other reviews were equally ecstatic and a sequel with Robert Pattinson playing the Joker’s nemesis Batman is said to be in the offing. Phoenix reportedly lost more than 23 kilos to play the part.
Phillips defended his film saying the jury “understood what we were trying to say and I hope that translates.”
But almost as many headlines are likely to be made by Polanski’s win.
Having spent most of his life as a fugitive from American justice, he was accused of drawing “obscene” parallels between himself and the persecuted French Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus, who was the victim of antisemitism and a miscarriage of justice around the turn of the 20th century.
(AFP)