Why should I care about the 82nd Venice International Film Festival?
If you’re in any way interested in cinema as culture, you’ll surely find something of interest in the programme. There’s dispute about whether Venice is the oldest film festival, but, launched in 1932, it is certainly the oldest of the big events. (That it has only reached its 82nd edition is down to the second World War and the political violence of the 1970s, which both caused cancellations.) The festival has always had a strong highbrow strand, but over the past decade or so it has leaned a little more mainstream. And, of course ...
What stars are visiting this year?
Movie stars love Venice. For all the flash of Cannes, the French festival can’t compete with the chance to arrive at the Excelsior Hotel, on the Lido, in a varnished speedboat. So, once again, we expect a galaxy. Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Cate Blanchett, Adam Driver, Oscar Isaac, Idris Elba, George Clooney, Adam Sandler, Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri and Amanda Seyfried are just some of the hopefuls who have films premiering this year. The notorious hoopla around Don’t Worry Darling, in 2022 – remember Harry Styles not spitting at Chris Pine? – confirmed Venice as the place for glam unveilings.
Is this really the start of the long, long Oscar season?
Let’s say it’s the start of the phoney war. Five of the past 10 Golden Lion winners at Venice went on to best-picture nominations at the Academy Awards. So take heed. Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, starring Clooney as a troubled movie star, will figure in conversation. Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt, featuring Julia Roberts as a college professor deep in controversy, sounds like a hot ticket. Emma Stone and the director Yorgos Lanthimos, whose Poor Things won the Lion and four Oscars two years ago, are back with an ecological thriller called Bugonia. And what about Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson in The Smashing Machine, Benny Safdie’s wrestling drama?
Is it Netflix as far as the eye can see?
Not quite. But, after sitting out Venice 2024, Netflix is back with three films in the main competition. All sound like potential awards players. Jay Kelly, from the director of Marriage Story and Frances Ha, has class written all over it. The streamer has forked out a fortune – as much as $120 million, or more than €100 million, reports suggest – for Guillermo del Toro’s take on Frankenstein, in which Isaac and Jacob Elordi star as creator and creature. We are promised a faithful take on the Mary Shelley source. Netflix is also delivering Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite, a White House thriller that Elba stars in.
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What will be this year’s The Brutalist?
Punters arrived last year unsure about Brady Corbet’s enormous epic concerning the rise and fall of an emigre architect in the postwar United States. That Saturday-night screening was a sensation. So where might the breakthrough come from this year? Perhaps from the same camp. Mona Fastvold, Corbet’s writing (and romantic) partner, competes with (brace yourself) a historical musical drama about the founder of the Shakers sect. The Testament of Ann Lee, starring Seyfried, sounds, if anything, even more peculiar than The Brutalist. We can’t wait.
What’s in it for the Irish?
Not an enormous amount this year. Fun will come from spotting the Dublin locations in Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother. That anthology film, which Screen Ireland coproduced, was shot in New Jersey, Paris and the Irish capital in late 2023 and early 2024. Element Pictures, long a powerhouse in the Irish film industry, reunites with Yorgos Lanthimos for a sixth time with the promising Bugonia – shot by the Oscar-nominated Dubliner Robbie Ryan. We will also be looking out for Eve Hewson in Jay Kelly. But ...
What’s missing?
There seemed a good chance that Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley would be on the Lido with Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet but, despite the director being a previous Golden Lion winner, the Shakespeare saga, absent from the schedule, seems likely to have its world premiere almost simultaneously at Telluride Film Festival, in Colorado. It looks as if Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, many cineastes’ most anticipated release of the year, will open on September 26th without troubling the autumn festivals.
What should we look out for away from the main competition?
This writer is excited about seeing Kim Novak, one of the few remaining supernovas of the 1950s, receive an honorary Golden Lion before a screening of Kim Novak’s Vertigo, a study of her contribution to Alfred Hitchcock’s most celebrated film. Werner Herzog, also getting a Golden Lion, presents a new doc called Ghost Elephants. Among the work from younger film-makers, Mark Jenkin’s Rose of Nevada sounds unmissable. The singular Cornish director follows up Bait and Enys Men with another weird science-fiction flick. Nobody yet knows what to think about Julian Schnabel directing the likes of Martin Scorsese, Gal Gadot, Jason Momoa and John Malkovich in a Faustian romp called In the Hand of Dante. But it sounds like something.
What will get the longest standing ovation?
Who cares? It’s worth again pointing out not only that the length of the standing ovation is meaningless – sometimes the director just leaves early and it shuts up – but also that the habit of reporting their duration has really only set in over the past five years. The obsession surely reached its tipping point last year, when, at the premiere of Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door, the crowd slapped their hands together for 17 blistery minutes. Mind you, the film did take the top prize.
So what will win the Golden Lion?
As ever, we turn to Neil Young, the Vienna-based film programmer and amateur oddsmaker, for the nap on the big race. Two films we haven’t yet mentioned top his odds. Young has Park Chan Wook’s No Other Choice as a tightish favourite, at 2/1. The Korean great, known for classics such as Oldboy and Decision to Leave, here adapts Donald E Westlake’s classic satire The Axe. Orphan, a drama from László Nemes, is second favourite, at 5/1. Then Jay Kelly, at 6/1, and Ildikó Enyedi’s anthology Silent Friend, at 7/1.
Venice International Film Festival runs until Saturday, September 6th
