At the end of the hot summer of 2022, the Venice Film Festival celebrated, rather confusingly, its 79th edition taking place 90 years after the first festival bowed in 1932 (it was suspended during the war years.) The festivity was capped by a hefty, in-depth history of the festival written by film critic and historian Gian Piero Brunetta and more star-studded films in the program than ever. With many strong films in competition and, wonder of wonders, Covid in remission (almost forgotten, in fact), the stage looked set for a return to the relaxed glamour of the Lido of yore. That happy anticipation was crushed, unfortunately, by a new ticketing system that put fest-goers into 5 hours of digital queuing – in timezones around the world – on the last Sunday of summer before the festival doors opened. But more of that story later.
As usual, Venice’s favorable position at the start of the fall season and its ever-growing clout with distributors gave it access to the best new films available; only Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical The Fabelmans might have escaped, preferring a Toronto premiere closer to home. Venice, however, grabbed Noah Baumbach’s White Noise for opening night and followed it with two Oscar front-runners, Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale with an unforgettable Brendan Fraser and Todd Field’s TÁR starring Cate Blanchett, plus Alejandro G. Inarritu’s autobiographical BARDO, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths. Among these heavy hitters, only Blanchett won a prize.
Instead, the jury chaired by Julianne Moore chose to honor smaller and edgier art films that dealt with social rather than personal problems. The Golden Lion went to a powerful documentary, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed directed by Laura Poitras, which honors the activism of artist Nan Goldin in holding the Sackler family accountable for the opioid crisis in America. Taking the Silver Lion was France’s Alice Diop for her wrenching, deep and highly controlled debut Saint Omer, set during the trial of a Senegalese woman who killed her infant daughter. Luca Guadagnino, the Italian director who has been making films in the U.S., took home the best director award for Bones and All, a road movie that uses cannibalism as a metaphor for queerness. And the Special Jury Award went to the Iranian film No Bears and a director who could not be present: Jafar Panahi was in prison serving a six-year sentence for his dissidence with the regime, which is more explicit than ever in his new film.
The acting awards to Cate Blanchett as a talented but complex orchestra conductor-composer in Todd Fields’ TÁR and to Colin Farrell as an Irish “nice guy” who is pushed beyond the limit in The Banshees of Inisherin both seemed to double as kudos to the films, which were among the festival’s most popular.
One inescapable theme this year, across all sections, was motherhood. Good mothers, bad mothers, women yearning to be mothers and others frightened by the responsibility it entails. In competition, Saint Omer led the pack with its subtle, beautifully unarticulated echoing of a mother who killed her baby mirrored in a pregnant writer excited and fearful of what it means to bring a child into the world. Immensity (L’immensità) saw Penélope Cruz magnificently embody a mother whose free spirit is crushed by bourgeois rigidity, while Tilda Swinton played both mother and daughter in The Eternal Daughter, with its implication that the stiff upper lip generation made it difficult for their offspring to embrace the potentialities of parenthood. In Other People’s Children (Les Enfants des Autres), a woman’s maternal yearning leads her to project onto a stepchild, while in the dreadful Blonde, a fetus talks, a camera assumes the viewpoint of a speculum, and the emotional scars left by a disturbed mother, combined with her failed attempts at having a baby, propel a fragile Marilyn Monroe into full-blown psychotic episodes.
Another notable trend was also the number of films with LGBTQ themes and characters, especially (but not only) in the sidebars. The Critics’ Week opened with the French drag-queen drama Three Nights a Week, while it also showcased the section’s winner Eismayer, an Austrian military drama that looks at gay desire and that also ended up winning the festival’s Queer Lion. Multiple awards also went to Anhell69, a Colombian drama that describes itself as a “trans” work in the sense that it combines many different influences, from documentary to fiction and cinematic reveries, as it retraces an abandoned film project for a ghost movie starring queer kids from Medellín.
In the Giornate degli Autori section, Blue Jean looked at Section 28 in England, which made it impossible for P.E. teachers such as the protagonist to come out at their own schools, while the sotto voce, largely non-narrative Lobo e Cão from Cláudia Varejão looks at queer life on the Azores and The Damned Don’t Cry chronicles a Moroccan teen’s uneasy relationship with a gay Frenchman. Like many films, it suggests that a sexual orientation that is questioned or needs to remain hidden is often further complicated by questions of power and dominance, including money, class, race and the place in society of the queer person in question, often making them doubly marginalised.
The official selection also had its fair share of queer or questioning protagonists. They include Andrea Pallaoro’s competition title Monica, which stars Trace Lysette as a transgender woman returning home to look after her aging mother; Gianno Amelio’s look at the life of gay poet and playwright Aldo Braibanti in The Lord of the Ants and Emanuele Crialese’s Penelope Cruz-starring drama Immensity, in which a child questions their gender as well. And not to forget The Whale, Darren Aronofsky’s moving portrait of a gay man who loses control over his body when the love of his life is hounded to suicide by a religious cult. Overall, it felt like queer representation has really gone mainstream in not only cinema but also some of the most important showcases for world cinema, such as the Venice Film Festival.
Now that the festival has ended it may seem like water under the bridge to chide its organizers for the disastrous new ticketing system that replaced the one that finally got the bugs out last year. However, the problems went far beyond technical issues. When Vivaticket’s Venice platform went live, social media was raging: impossibly long queues, system crashes, navigation problems. It could take over an hour to get one ticket, and then you’d be kicked out and have to start over in a new queue to try to get others.
Many assumed Vivaticket would fix the bugs by the time we arrived in Venice. Not so. Not only were the cock-ups persistent, but the press office fell notably silent. Instead, festival director Alberto Barbera told us it was our fault for all going online at the same time when the system opened at 7 AM. Had Venice staggered the times in which one could book tickets, giving priority pass holders from press and industry the first slot and then opening it up to the others, many of the issues would have been solved. Instead the festival’s solution was to open the system even earlier, at 6:45 AM. It was a slap in the face, given that most of us are forced to write well into the night hours, and clearly suggested that our well-being and our jobs were of no consequence. Without a ticket we couldn’t do our work, but never was this recognized. Three years into the pandemic, it’s not too much to ask that festivals find ways to make the seating process easier, and to abolish tickets altogether for press and industry screenings, as many smart events have done successfully. Festivals that turn their backs on the professionals whose work promotes them, treating them like fractious children, are the ones with the problems.
