“Death in Venice”: the phrase, a nod to the fiftieth anniversary masterpiece of the same name by Luchino Visconti (released in 1971), sums up quite well the gloomy atmosphere that reigns in the films selected at the 78e edition of the Mostra, which will end on September 11.
If we stick to the films in competition (some of which have yet to be discovered), each day has brought its share of traumas, torture (Vidblysk, by Ukrainian Valentyn Vasyanovych), lost child (Parallel Mothers, by Pedro Almodovar), from convicted patient (Sundown, of Mexican Michel Franco), of missing father (La Caja, of Venezuelan Lorenzo Vigas), of traumatized mother (The Lost Daughter, by the American Maggie Gyllenhaal)…
The issue is not so much the darkness of the scenarios as the formal and artistic choices associated with the works, which, for the most part, are unfortunately fairly agreed upon. So it is with the disappointing Parallel Mothers, Almodovar, who opened the competition on 1er September: the story of two single women (Penélope Cruz and Milena Smit) who give birth, alone, and whose babies are inadvertently exchanged in the birth room. Added to this story is the search for the burial of a great-grandparent, who disappeared during the civil war. We look in vain for the Almodovarian fabric, in this drama which offers so little staging, and produces a slightly mechanical story, close to a televisual object – Penélope Cruz deploys much more talent in the cheering Competencia Oficial, by the Argentinian duo Gaston Duprat and Mariano Cohn, a parody of the movie star-system, a self-mockery game to which Antonio Banderas and Oscar Martinez also lend themselves brilliantly.
Powerful roles
For lack of discoveries or surprising ideas, certain works, no matter how well produced, do not take off their status as “subject films”. Evacuate the pathos, it comes back at a gallop. In The Power of the Dog, Jane Campion explores the masculine world of cowboys, where the repressed homosexuality of one of the protagonists (Benedict Cumberbatch) is hidden. We feel the theme coming from the first images, and the story takes a heavy step towards this revelation.
Some films are an exception, and death can figure in the center of a sumptuous picture, as the Italian Michelangelo Frammartino proves in He buco (“The hole”), homage to an expedition of speleologists in the Apennines, in Calabria, descending 700 meters underground, at the place of the Bifurto chasm.
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