Venezia 77
Tengo Miedo Torero (My Tender Matador), Rodrigo Sepúlveda (2020)
A feeling of elation pervaded the 77th annual Mostra Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica della Biennale di Venezia, a joy at its mere existence. The festival's opening ceremony was a jubilant affair, filled with individuals who had hitherto perhaps taken certain things for granted—the ability to travel at all, much less to a pristine Venice, to congretate in celebration of cinema; the simple act of sitting, among others, in a darkened room watching the magical flickering of images across a screen. The festival proceeded like clockwork, that flicker occassionally interrupted by the flash of a torch in warning, a one-time-only occasion for spectators to adjust the positioning of their masks, or relocate to the appropriate socially-distanced seat, lest they be thrown out of the theater.
The world, indeed, has changed, and several films screening at this year's Venice International Film Festival seemed particularly prescient. Topics of race, poverty, and precarity governed two otherwise disparate films in Competition—Chloé Zhao's gauzy and gritty Nomadland, and Michel Franco's structurally superior Nuevo Orden (New Order), a near-futuristic vision of Mexico City in the grips of social disintegration. Fault lines along axes of access, nationality, and wealth were similarly explored in Kaouther Ben Hania's art-world satire The Man Who Sold His Skin and Gianfranco Rosi's masterful Notturno, a kaleidescopic study of the fallout of the Syrian Civil War that was, mysteriously, all but ignored by the Competition jury. Never Gonna Snow Again, Malgorzata Szumowska and Michal Englert's beguiling portrait of class fissures and existential ennui in a gated community in Poland, and Indian filmmaker Chaitanya Tamhane's excellent second feature The Disciple were standouts, as were Kornél Mundruczó's Pieces of a Woman, brimming with the influence of Cassavetes, and Mona Fastvold's gorgeously-performed frontier lesbian drama The World to Come. Politically speaking, two films by women—Regina King's One Night in Miami, and Julia von Heinz's Und Morgen die Ganze Welt (And Tomorrow the Entire World)—rang like clarion calls against all-too-familiar realities of racial injustice and resurgent European nationalist movements. Meanwhile, Quentin Dupieux's supremely odd buddy-comedy Mandibules added a welcome register of levity to the line-up.
Below are Filmatique's Best Films of the 77th Venice International Film Festival:
200 Meters, Ameen Nayfeh
City Hall, Frederick Wiseman
Dear Comrades!, Andrei Konchalovsky
The Disciple, Chaitanya Tamhane
The Furnace, Roderick MacKay
Ghosts, Azra Deniz Okyay
The Man Who Sold His Skin, Kaouther Ben Hania
Mandibules, Quentin Dupieux
Miss Marx, Susanna Nicchiarelli
Nuevo Orden (New Order), Michel Franco
Never Gonna Snow Again, Malgorzata Szumowska & Michal Englert
Nomadland, Chloé Zhao
Notturno, Gianfranco Rosi
One Night in Miami, Regina King
Pieces of a Woman, Kornél Mundruczó
Tengo Miedo Torero (My Tender Matador), Rodrigo Sepúlveda
Und Morgen die Ganze Welt (And Tomorrow the Entire World), Julia von Heinz
The Wasteland, Ahmad Bahrami
The Whaler Boy, Philipp Yuryev
Wife of a Spy, Kiyoshi Kurosawa
The World to Come, Mona Fastvold
Mandibules, Quentin Dupieux (2020)