Venezia 79
Saint Omer, Alice Diop (2022)
The era of COVID had all but expired at the 79th annual Mostra Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica della Biennale di Venezia. Queues of festivalgoers snaked along the lagoon at all hours of the day, hoping to catch a spot on the vaporetto heading to Lido, and the festival grounds felt uncharacteristically crowded. It was as if the times of social distancing, apprehensive contact, and sparsely populated industry events never existed at all.
Two ghost stories of sorts—Joanna Hogg's ephemeral The Eternal Daughter, an aesthetic and narrative experiment in minimalism itself necessitated by pandemic production restraints; and Tár, a rivetingly complex refraction of obsession, ambition, and female-centered Me Too accusations—featured tour-de-force performances from Tilda Swinton and Cate Blanchett, their respective protagonists, and evoked the eerie bygone times of a COVID era since forgotten. Luca Guadagnino's hotly anticipated cannibal yarn Bones and All was far less nuanced, registering as a notable disappointment with its gratuitous violence and inconscpicuous pandering to the coveted young adult demographic. Olivia Wilde's Don't Worry Darling also underwhelmed, to say nothing of all that commotion happening offscreen.
Instead, marvels were to be found in smaller productions. Alice Diop's mesmerizing debut Saint Omer traces the trial of a young Senegalese mother accused of infanticide in northern France, while Carolina Cavalli's wry, stylized portrait of female ennui heralds a new filmmaking voice in Italian cinema. Sergei Loznitsa's archival reconstruction The Kiev Trial and Michal Vinik's well-acted and narratively taut mail-order-bride drama Valeria is Getting Married provided disparate yet topical angles on the tragedy unfolding in Ukraine.
Below are Filmatique's Best Films of the 79th Venice International Film Festival:
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Nan Goldin
Amanda, Carolina Cavalli
Argentina, 1985, Santiago Mitre
Athena, Romain Gavras
The Banshees of Inisherin, Martin McDonagh
Blanquita, Fernando Guzzoni
Bread and Salt, Damian Kocur
The Eternal Daughter, Joanna Hogg
In Viaggio, Gianfranco Rosi
The Kiev Trial, Sergei Loznitsa
Love Life, Kōji Fukada
No Bears, Jafar Panahi
Obet (Victim), Michal Blaško
Saint Omer, Alice Diop
Tár, Todd Field
Valeria is Getting Married, Michal Vinik
World War III, Houman Seyedi
Zapatos Rojos, Carlos Eichelmann Kaiser
The Eternal Daughter, Joanna Hogg (2022)