This year’s Venice may turn out to be a test case for auteur power. The US actors’ strike means that Hollywood stars are unlikely to appear on the red carpet, leaving the directors’ names to pull in the crowds – and ensuring that non-American faces get the lion’s share of the flashbulb action. Some films, nevertheless, have secured interim agreements with actors’ union Sag-Aftra, notably Ferrari, starring Adam Driver – who was certainly here for the film’s press conference – and Sofia Coppola’s biopic Priscilla.
But, at the time of writing, it’s not yet clear who else may show up, which means that it’s down to the behind-the-camera names to stir up the interest. That should not be too much of a stretch, given that this year’s official selection includes revered directors such as Yorgos Lanthimos, Ava DuVernay and David Fincher – not to mention Woody Allen and Roman Polanski, whose inclusion has predictably furrowed many brows, and the late William Friedkin.
One missing name is Venice favourite Luca Guadagnino, whose tennis-themed love-triangle drama Challengers, starring Zendaya, was due to open the festival, but was pulled by studio MGM in view of the strike. The replacement opener, Comandante, is by a director little known outside Italy, Edoardo De Angelis, and it’s something you don’t see too often – an Italian submarine epic. One may be quite enough for most of us. A prestige production heavily charged with pseudo-poetical ballast, it’s a grandly mounted, sometimes intensely atmospheric, but overall a moody, pompous affair.
Comandante is based on the true story of Salvatore Todaro, a second world war submarine commander who sank a Belgian merchant ship in the Atlantic, but then rescued a boatload of survivors at considerable risk to himself and his crew. The realism is formidable – you really get the scent of machine oil, battery acid, sweat and cook’s lard in the galley. And the film is also quite a showcase for the forbidding glare of star Pierfrancesco Favino, with his arresting, somewhat feral physiognomy.
Of course, it feels strange to watch a film that glorifies the heroism of a fascist-era navy, but – allegedly – an intended subtext is the idea that if one of Mussolini’s commanders could behave with honour in wartime, then why can’t Giorgia Meloni’s government today be more compassionate in its policy towards rescuing migrant boats? If that’s the intention, it doesn’t really register: this comes across like a grandstanding hymn to masculinity, integrity and the national right stuff. “Why did you save us?” “Because we’re Italians!” Comandante’s production values may just save it from being torpedoed by critics on release.
Indeed, the competition seems to have been front-loaded with duds. One of the most eagerly awaited films was El Conde, the latest from Chilean director Pablo Larraín, a Venice regular – most recently with his English-language portraits Jackie and Spencer. In El Conde (The Count), he goes back to his roots as a satirical commentator on Chile’s Pinochet years, which he did with unsettling brilliance in his early films Tony Manero and Post Mortem.
Lavish and deeply eccentric as El Conde is, it’s a one-joke film: imagine if the dictator Augusto Pinochet (Jaime Vadell) were a 250-year-old vampire, still alive and hiding out in a cavernous corrugated iron hangar in deepest Patagonia. The sub-jokes arising from this are that the film is narrated in voiceover by Margaret Thatcher (an on-the-nail performance by Stella Gonet), and the late revelation that her close relationship with the general was far weirder than you imagined. Theatrical and talky, though gorgeously designed (Rodrigo Bazaes) and majestically shot in black and white (Ed Lachman), El Conde is a ponderous bore, only livened up by some loopy flying sequences, a subplot involving an exorcist-accountant-nun (now that’s what you call a hyphenate) and a supporting role from Larraín regular Alfredo Castro, reliably the weirdest presence in Latin American cinema, as Pinochet’s fur-hatted Russian factotum.
Likely to be the low point of the competition is Luc Besson’s Dogman. It stars Caleb Landry Jones, the actor you most expect to turn up playing the Joker, here doing almost that. Set in New Jersey, Dogman is essentially a supervillain movie in melodrama-thriller vein. Jones plays a disabled misfit and occasional Edith Piaf impersonator raised by violently deranged religious fanatics, who grows up to find that his only friends are dogs and drag queens. It’s bizarre, hyperventilating stuff, with Jones comparatively muted by his standards, playing a tragic figure who has a preternatural sympathetic bond with the many pooches he adopts: they carry out jewellery heists at his telepathic bidding, without him so much as having to call fetch. They also help him mete out justice to a Latino street gang portrayed with staggeringly racist insensitivity.
It’s possibly one of the worst films yet from Besson, who has considerable form in making duds on both sides of the Atlantic. This Dogman, by the way, is not to be confused with Dogman, also a film about a dog-loving outsider facing criminals, made in 2018 by Matteo Garrone, whose migrant drama Io Capitano is a must-see here later this week.
Things picked up with a much-heralded film that had considerable flaws, but at least came across as a big-screen proposition with genuine expertise and passion. Ferrari marks the return of Hollywood perfectionist Michael Mann (Manhunter, Collateral), and is a large-scale labour of love, a portrait of the famous Italian racing driver turned motor mogul Enzo Ferrari. It’s not a biopic per se: scripted by the late British film and TV eminence Troy Kennedy Martin, it focuses on one year of Ferrari’s life, 1957 – a time of crisis in which his company faces money problems, world record rivalry from Maserati, and eventually a horrific tragedy.
Oddly, the film frames his life as a somewhat static boardroom-and-bedroom drama, with Ferrari trying to save his threatened company while dividing his domestic life between his lover Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley, intelligently simpitica) and his wife and business partner, Laura. She’s played by Penélope Cruz, who often shows up in Venice selections, passing off creditably as Italian, but here is in sixth gear from the start, perpetually fuming in black as she channels Roman screen diva Anna Magnani.
Ferrari himself is played by Adam Driver, which would sound like joke casting if Mann had much of a sense of humour. He’s solid in the lead, projecting patriarchal gravitas with grey hair and finely tailored suits, but overall somewhat glumly saturnine, making Ferrari look all the more of a cold fish in his focused ruthlessness. The dialogue is in English, with the multinational cast speaking with Italian accents. Driver, mercifully, keeps his well in check, presumably having learned from the just-one-Cornetto catastrophe of House of Gucci.
Much of Ferrari is grave and stilted, but all praise to Mann for sticking his neck out to make an old-school Eurodrama with real locations, real hardware, real stunt driving – and if any director knows how to film fast cars speeding, crashing, flying through the air, he’s the one. Ferrari is impressive, once it gets round to revving up. Let’s hope the festival follows suit.
Venice 2023: coming highlights
Priscilla
This is a big year for biopics in Venice, with Mann’s Ferrari, Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein drama Maestro – already trailing controversy – and this from Sofia Coppola, whose Somewhere won Venice’s Golden Lion in 2010. It’s her portrait of Priscilla Presley, the wife of Elvis. Cailee Spaeny stars, alongside Euphoria’s Jacob Elordi as the young “king”.
The Killer
David Fincher returns to crime drama with the story of a hitman on the run, starring Michael Fassbender and based on a French graphic novel. Not to be confused with Richard Linklater’s out-of-competition title Hit Man, in which the hired killer is also an undercover cop.
Evil Does Not Exist
Ryûsuke Hamaguchi is Japanese cinema’s most feted auteur in years, his Drive My Car winning the 2022 Oscar for best international feature. His latest revolves around two Tokyo executives attempting to launch a glamping site – but, knowing Hamaguchi, it may be a lot more teasingly complex than that suggests.
Daaaaaali!
Another from the indefatigably prolific French screen surrealist Quentin Dupieux. Only a month after premiering a surprise chamber piece called Yannick, he unveils a comedy about Salvador Dalí – or is it? At least, it’s about a journalist trying to interview the madcap maestro. Expect bizarrerie a-go-go and perhaps the odd melting clock.
