When a film depicts or references the city where it premieres, it normally makes for easy laughs. The audience is delighted to recognize a certain building, a prominent vista or an everyday detail that can only be found in this particular place. Behind the pleasant surprise lies a bigger comfort provided by this kind of recognition: The audience is assured that it chose well in travelling to this city as it apparently also was worthy of the attention of the cherished filmmakers whose works the audience has come to see. So festival programmers usually make sure to include films and series that reference the festival’s location.
Bearing these preliminary remarks in mind, I wasn’t surprised to find Venice referenced in three different works in this year’s Mostra di cinema. But I was astonished how far these references went beyond the effect of mere recognition and in each case made for a fascinating key to understanding the three works and their specific aesthetic and narrative strategies.
Disclaimer by Alfonso Cuarón (TV mini-series, presented out of competition)
In Alfonso Cuarón’s first foray into television, Venice is the holiday destination of a young British heterosexual couple that travels around Europe by train in the summer of 2001. We first encounter them making love on the train to Venice. The flat but picturesque landscape passing by in the windows while the two are at it bear no resemblance to the rather drab surroundings that garnish the railroad to Venice. But once the couple has reached Venezia Santa Lucia train station, the city is instantly recognizable. There’s the Canal Grande, the Rialto Bridge, the gondolas, all used by the constantly turned-on couple as backgrounds for photo shoots and extensive make-out sessions. However, once the young woman learns that her aunt has died, the carefree times are over. She heads back to Britain while he stays behind, travelling around Italy on his own.
While together, the couple is ostentatiously portrayed as obnoxious. Their sex drive verges on exhibitionism while their disdain for the rich history of Venice marks them as the kind of ignorant tourists that will bring the city to the brink of collapse in the years to come. The ignorance, however, extends to the filmmaker(s) as they use Venice in the same vain as the couple: as a mere background to their unsubtle stagings. For Disclaimer, Cuarón and his collaborators make use of most of the markers that have come to define the current crop of so-called prestige TV: a bestselling book as the base for the script, high-profile actors such as Cate Blanchett and Sacha Baron Cohen, supposedly crave-worthy middle-to-upper-class settings and attractive locations such as London and Venice. There is no specificity to either the characters or the locations, they are all in service of the relentless plotting that drives the seven-part series. If Venice is the victim of over-tourism, in the case of Disclaimer it is also the victim of over-television: just one more prop in the relentless churning-out of content.
Queer by Luca Guadagnino (feature film, presented in competition)
There is not a single shot of Venice in Luca Guadagnino’s new feature film. But then there is also not a single shot of Mexico in it, even though the film is almost exclusively set in the country. For Queer, Guadagnino and his production designer Stefano Baisi have recreated mid-century Mexico City in Rome’s Cinecittà studios. From the start it is clear Guadagnino and his team have not strived to give the film a naturalistic feel: There is an ostensible flatness to the backdrops and an acute artificiality to the lightning. When Daniel Craig’s William Lee, an alter ego of Queer author William S. Burroughs, first sets out to roam the streets of Mexico City in search of drinks, drugs, and love, we immediately get the sense of a very limited space, a fantasy version of the Distrito Federal that has almost certainly only ever existed in Burroughs’ head.
At one point, a detached Lee passes a crowd of agitated Mexicans staging a cock fight in the middle of the street. In the background we briefly see a bar called “Venecia”, a faint echo of the “old world” in a decidedly “new world” setting. In Luca Guadagnino’s self-conscious staging that echo becomes even more faint: it’s the echo of an echo, barely perceptible but there, nonetheless. The idea of an echo of an echo is central to the staging of Queer as the neo-colonial leanings of the novel are not reproduced by the film but rather relegated to the margins. There is a story of neo-colonial exploitation of Mexico and Mexicans by US Americans in Burroughs’ telling of Lee’s excessive appetites, but with his highly stylized staging, Guadagnino makes it abundantly clear that he doesn’t even pretend to explore it: his sole focus is on the tragic love story between Lee and the young American Eugene. One might find this regrettable. But it is honest, nonetheless.
The Brutalist by Brady Corbet (feature film, presented in competition)
It comes as a shock when after more than three hours spent in the past – of Europe, of the United States, of cinema – Brady Corbet suddenly vaults into the almost-present. Up until then he has told the story of the fictional Jewish architect László Tóth who survived Buchenwald concentration camp and has tried for the better part of two decades to be accepted by American Christian and capitalist society. With an astonishing relentlessness towards his birth country, Corbet shows the United States as a place of unforgiveable ignorance towards art and Jews.
But recognition awaits – in Venice. It’s at the beginning of the 80s at the architecture biennale that Tóth’s accomplishments are finally celebrated on a grand scale. He receives a lifetime achievement award and is warmly fêted by peers and family alike. At the same time his finished works are finally presented to the film’s audience who up until then was only ever granted a partial look at his creations. Only in Venice, it is implied, can we truly get a sense of Tóth’s genius.
The coda of The Brutalist makes for a homecoming of sorts for Tóth who fled Europe almost 40 years ago but even more so for Brady Corbet whose cinema owes so much to European masters such as Andrei Tarkovsky, Béla Tarr or Lars von Trier. That Corbet was awarded the prize as best director by the International Jury of this year’s Mostra only adds to the idea that Venice really is the place where your ideas come to imminent life.
Hannah Pilarczyk
Edited by Alissa Simon
© FIPRESCI 2024