Xan Brooks 

Venice film festival: beyond the A-list

Cynics may see the festival's newfound openness as a reflection of its dwindling cachet, but A-listers aren't the only show in town, writes Xan Brooks
  
  

Birdman photocall
Amy Ryan, Edward Norton, Emma Stone, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Michael Keaton and Andrea Riseborough promote Birdman in Venice. Photograph: Splash/Corbis Photograph: Splash News/Corbis

The 71st Venice film festival lays its red carpet beneath blue skies and allows the mosquitoes to mix freely with the delegates outside the evening screenings. It's the most venerable event on the circuit, older than Cannes and Berlin and based at a marble monstrosity from the Mussolini era. This year, however, hidebound old Venice is rebranding itself as a home for fresh voices and new talent. "Venice is not a closed club," declared Alberto Barbera, the festival director, at the opening press conference. Everyone is welcome, so long as their films are seen to pass muster.

Cynics, of course, may feel that Barbera is making a virtue out of impoverishment. The 2014 lineup lacks many of the A-list names and splashy American titles that guarantee blanket coverage, while two potential entries (David Fincher's Gone Girl; Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice) slipped the net at the eleventh hour and will now premiere in New York. One person's "festival of discovery", it seems, is another's parade of also-rans.

At least the opening film laid some doubts to rest. Most delegates were in raptures over Birdman, a rambunctious backstage psychodrama, framed in a series of immaculately choreographed takes and chasing Michael Keaton's fracturing Hollywood actor through the wings of a Broadway theatre. Directed by Mexico's Alejandro González Iñárritu, it's a film of gonzo exuberance and great, gaudy plumage, spinning from one outlandish set piece to the next. I confess I didn't love Birdman as much as other reviewers (too much technique; not enough heart). But there's no denying it afforded the event a vertiginous lift-off.

Elsewhere, the guests gathered for an audience with The President, Mohsen Makhmalbaf's spry political satire about a tinpot dictator. They also met The Goob, a pungent bit of poetic social-realism, evocatively played out in the flatlands of Norfolk. There are 55 films in the official lineup, whittled down from about 1,700 submissions. That's significantly fewer than play at Cannes or Toronto – but it's still more than enough to be getting along with.

It is almost enough to make you feel for Andrew Garfield's repo-man, nervously knocking at doors throughout 99 Homes. Garfield, in turn, is in the pay of Michael Shannon's realtor, a sharp-suited Mephistopheles, feeding off the foreclosed homes of recession-hit Florida. "Don't be soft," Shannon's character advises his protege. "They've all got a sob story, but the law is the law." Ramin Bahrani's morality play is crude but heartfelt, fired by a bracing blend of pity and rage. Garfield and Shannon play it with gusto.

I also liked The Price of Fame, a genial, fact-based picaresque about two bungling clowns (Benoît Poelvoorde, Roschdy Zem) who dig up Charlie Chaplin's corpse and then hold it to ransom. The film is directed by Xavier Beauvois, who made the stark and elusive Of Gods and Men a few years back. And yet this broad, big-hearted caper could scarcely be more different. Chaplin, wherever he is, would have approved of the handling.

All the same, my stand-out picture from the opening days remains The Look of Silence, Joshua Oppenheimer's shattering autopsy of the 1960s Indonesian genocide. This serves as a flipside (or possibly a counter) to the director's brilliant, Bafta-winning The Act of Killing, in that it spotlights the victims as opposed to the villains. By zeroing in on the story of one village family that lost its son in the purge, Oppenheimer and Adi Rukun (the film's soulful, questing investigator) conspire to lift the lid on a vast collective madness. In this grisly, upside-down nation, indiscriminate slaughter is rewarded, the perpetrators roam free, and a devout local thug explains the best way to stay sane. "If I didn't drink blood I'd go crazy," he boasts, his eyes darting, his jaw clenching. "I'd be calling to prayer from the trees."

Ahead of Venice's first evening screening, the Lido was rocked by a march of 2,000 city workers. They came surging towards the cinema, blowing air-horns and whistles, protesting against pay cuts and calling for the mayor to stand down. Penned back behind cordons, the marchers demanded a place on the red carpet; they said the public sector deserved it. And here, perhaps, was the real, happy consequence of Barbera's open-door policy. If the A-listers won't show, Venice must accept the guests that it gets.

 

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