Postcards from Venice: Movies to Remember

As the Venice Film Festival heads into its closing stretch, visitors began speculating on the front runners for the awards to be handed out by the Jury headed by Quentin Tarantino. Many hoped that the Golden Lion would go to Detective Dee and the Mystery of Phantom Flame, Tsui Hark’s pinwheeling delight of a Chinese action film. Others noted, with fear and trembling, that Tarantino was seen vigorously applauding the Festival’s one squawking turkey. Could A Sad Trumpet Ballad, the Spanish clown catastrophe directed by Alex de la Iglesia (Ferpect Crime), take the top prize? Would Natalie Portman get Best Actress for her harrowing portrait of a troubled prima ballerina in Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan? And, on the island paradise of the Lido, would it ever stop raining?

All will be answered on Saturday evening. For now, we offer an interim report on some of the most notable films at the 67th Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica — la Biennale di Venezia 2010. Note to North American movie lovers: most of these works will also be shown at the Toronto Film Festival, which opens today.

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Detective Dee and the Mystery of Phantom Flame
Tsui Hark, who directed about half of the best films of Hong Kong’s golden age (Peking Opera Blues, Once Upon a Time in China, Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain) and produced most of the other half (A Better Tomorrow, A Chinese Ghost Story, Iron Monkey), returns in fabulous form with this gorgeous action picture about the intrigue attending the rise of history’s first female emperor. Carina Lau is Empress Wu, Li Bingbing her right-hand woman and Andy Lau the seventh-century “detective,” Di Rienjie, hired to solve the riddle of high-ranking officials who keep bursting into flames. A nonstop masterpiece of production design, narrative cunning and martial-arts mayhem (choreographed by Sammo Hung), Detective Dee is the first China-Hong Kong coproduction since Hero to make good on the grand promise of epic entertainment. —R.C.

Potiche
Suzanne Pujol (Catherine Deneuve) is the pretty, pampered, imprisoned wife of an umbrella-factory owner (Fabrice Luchini). She blithely overlooks his rudeness, his infidelities, his ignoring of her birthday. But when he falls ill combatting a work stoppage inspired by the local communist leader (Gerard Depardieu), and reluctantly lets her manage the business in his absence, Suzanne proves that French industry, and a turbulent household, can flourish under the right woman’s touch. Francois Ozon dusts off a 1970s boulevard comedy by Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Gredy (Cactus Flower, 40 Carats) and turns it into a glittering showcase for Deneuve, still charismatic at 66. Depardieu offers warm support as a man who thinks himself enlightened but has lessons to learn from a housewife; and Karin Viard is a treat as Luchini’s secretary and mistress, who discovers the more fulfilling joys of entrepreneurial sisterhood. This bonbon of a film is as colorful as all the umbrellas of Cherbourg. This might have been a soggy Venice, but nothing can rain on Ozon’s parade — not with Deneuve leading it in song. —M.C.

13 Assassins
Takashi Miike, who turned 50 two weeks ago, no longer directs six or seven wildly inventive films a year; in 2010 the manic-impressive auteur has slowed down to a snail-like two movies, both of them at Venice. One is a sequel to his 2004 hit Zebraman, about an ordinary man who dons a superhero suit and battles the forces of evil. (Sound familiar, Kick-Ass fans?) The other is this churning, fairly traditional war drama set in the last days of the samurai. How can a dozen dedicated fighters, plus a crazy fellow who wanders into the action, overcome the attack of 200 professionals under the luridly evil Lord Naritsugu? Just watch! The good guys are aided by superior swordsmanship, a stampede of blazing cattle and more dynamite than was exploded in World War II. Miike calls this a “samurai terror film showing the flowers of life and death. Simple, radical, beautiful.” Fans of the director know he always makes good on his promises. —R.C.

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Silent Souls
A woman who charms men while she lives can still work her spell after she dies. In this delicate, mysterious road movie from director Aleksei Fedorchenko, the widower Miron resolves to bury his late wife Tanya in a sacred lake in West Russia, according to the strictures of the Merya culture. His companion is his friend Aist, who, we suspect, also loved Tanya. Along the way, in the Merya tradition, Miron shares intimate details of his life with Tanya. Fedorchenko doesn’t clear up all of the secrets of this marriage; that is part of the film’s subtle, folkloric power. It reminds us that our world still has many unexplored regions and rituals that at first may seem alien, but which speak to the essential human need to find a resting place for tortured souls and undying love. —M.C.

The Town
According to a statement at the beginning of Ben Affleck’s solid, standard heist drama, the Charlestown neighborhood of Boston boasts the world’s highest concentration of thieves and bank robbers. In The Town, some are smooth like Doug (Affleck), some are salty like Jem (The Hurt Locker‘s Jeremy Renner), but all speak in a patois so cryptic that, for clarity, even the Americans here were reading the Italian subtitles. The two intelligible souls: an FBI agent (Jon Hamm from Mad Men) and Claire (Rebecca Hall, who was Vicky in Vicky Cristina Barcelona), the manager of a bank Doug’s gang has robbed and whom Doug lures into a semi-love affair, for no other reason than that, without it, there wouldn’t be a plot. These characters don’t range too far from stereotypes, but it’s a likable variation of the familiar theme, with a tangy Boston atmosphere that, as one character says, is “authentitious.” —R.C.

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Black Venus
In the early 19th century, Saartije Baartman, a Khoi tribeswoman from South Africa, was brought to Europe and exhibited, naked, among the medical establishment and salon society as the “Hottentot Venus” — an exotic, one-woman freak show. This true parable of racial and sexual exploitation is the subject of the searing, if overlong, biographical drama by Abdellatif Kechiche, whose The Secret of the Grain won Cesar Awards (the French Oscars) for film, direction and screenplay. In her forced tour of degradation, Saartije (Yahima Torres) finds two main enslavers: her lover and master Caesar (Andre Jacobs), who introduces her to doctors eager to prove that black people are more like apes than civilized men; and Reaux (Olivier Gourmet), a sort of P.T. Barnum of prurience, who pushes her into sexual slavery in the Paris bordellos of the day. Some scenes of Reaux’s manipulation of Saartije before an audience of giggling ladies and gentlemen are among the most painful in recent cinema; to watch them is to acknowledge complicity in four centuries of white men’s subjugation of black women (and men). But it all happened. After Saartije’s death at 26, in 1817, plaster molds fashioned from her corpse, and jars containing her genitals and brain were on display in a Paris museum until 1994. In 2002 her remains were returned to South Africa. —M.C.

Quentin Tarantino’s Impromptu Film Studies Class
He’s not just an auteur, an actor and the President of this year’s Venice jury, he’s also one of the most passionate and provocative of film educators. A graduate of Video Store U., Tarantino has seemingly seen every B movie made over the last 50 years in the U.S., Hong Kong, South Korea, South America, the Philippines and, of course, Italy. In conjunction with a Venice retrospective of Spaghetti Western director Sergio Corbucci, Tarantino showed up at a midnight screening of Minnesota Clay to give a lively, detailed, 12-min. lecture on Corbucci. Declaring that his remarks were “just for the people in this room, not for YouTube,” he advised everyone to shut off recording equipment — and ejected one fellow who kept filming him. An education and a confrontation: that’s what Tarantino gives you at Venice.—R.C.

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