WHO IS THAT MASKED SUPERSTAR-IN-THE-MAKING?
THIS is the 77th and surely the strangest Venice Film Festival of all, even allowing for the years when Mussolini tried to turn it into a show of fascist might. The world’s oldest film festival is the first to take place since the pandemic struck, and the number of movie stars on the terrace of the swanky Excelsior Hotel is accordingly depleted. Even identifying the few who have come to the Venice Lido isn’t always easy, under their masks.
Still, everyone here is thrilled to be back, which may be why films are getting enthusiastic applause they don’t always deserve.
Two that resoundingly do feature Vanessa Kirby, the English actress who was such a revelation as the young Princess Margaret in the Netflix series The Crown, and is now well on her way to becoming a major star.
She plays Americans in both films, though one is set in modern-day Boston, the other in frontier territory in the 1850s.
In the former, Pieces Of A Woman, Kirby plays Martha, who is about to give birth for the first time — although by the end of a harrowing pre-title sequence, she has lost her baby. It is a home birth and the midwife (Molly Parker) appears to be at fault.
Criminal proceedings begin, but director Kornel Mundruczo’s film focuses on the impact of the tragedy on Martha’s relationships — above all with her constructionworker husband Sean (Shia LaBeouf) and her mother (Ellen Burstyn), who has always felt that Martha married beneath her. Burstyn, now 87, is magnificent. But this is Kirby’s film. It’s a spellbinding performance.
She is terrific, too, in Mona Fastvold’s The World To Come, a love story narrated through the diaries of Abigail (Katherine Waterston, also excellent), a downtrodden farmer’s wife who finds solace in the arms of a new neighbour, the more outgoing Tallie (Kirby).
I loved The Duke, an out-of-competition film telling the true story of the theft of Goya’s painting of the Duke of Wellington, which stars Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren; and also greatly admired the Festival’s opening film, the Italian-language Lacci (The Ties).
But the film I was looking forward to most, Regina King’s One Night In Miami, fictionalising the aftermath of Cassius Clay’s 1964 defeat of Sonny Liston, was poorly scripted, over-theatrical and a thumping disappointment.