In the end, it didn’t matter that much that many of the big names stayed away. Those who did come to Venice, including Adam Driver, Wes Anderson and Sofia Coppola – some thanks to interim agreements with the US writers’ and actors’ guilds – overwhelmingly stated their support for the Hollywood strikes that have cast a critical spotlight on film business practices. And after a sluggish start, there was a rich crop of major films that made you glad to be on the Lido. So Venice retains its claim to be a formidable A-list festival – yet not a truly international one. The makeup of this year’s competition was emphatically American and European, except for one film from Japan, one from Chile and one from a Mexican director – Michel Franco’s Memory, yet to screen at time of writing – but with a North American cast headed by Jessica Chastain.
Still, even with its mainstream slant, the Venice selection had vigour. The competition wasn’t exactly brimming with experimental invention, but then we did have Yorgos Lanthimos’s much-awaited Poor Things, the Greek director’s most joyously outre work yet. Based on Alasdair Gray’s novel, it’s a Victorian fantasy about a young woman (Emma Stone) reanimated by a Frankenstein-like surgeon (a juicily eccentric Willem Dafoe). With a child’s fast-developing brain and the body and libido of a mature woman, she embarks on a voyage of discovery with a swaggering roué (played by Mark Ruffalo with an insanely variable English-bounder accent). Lanthimos and his team devise some hallucinatory visuals (the heroine’s costumes alone, by Holly Waddington, are beyond delirium), and Stone gives a wild, witty and audacious performance that is sheer delight.
There was more left-field invention in competition, notably an out-and-out UFO drama, The Theory of Everything, by German cameraman turned director Timm Kröger. An eerie Alpine mystery involving quantum theory, doppelgangers on skis and a jazz-singing femme fatale, it’s fabulously shot in black and white and resembles Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain rewritten by Philip K Dick and filmed by Orson Welles. Cult status awaits. There was also genre-bending from French conceptualist Bertrand Bonello. The Beast is a very experimental provocation set in the present, the early 20th century and the near future, and starring Léa Seydoux and George MacKay as two people living multiple lives. It’s ostensibly based on a Henry James story, but despite a couple of decorous 1900 salon scenes it’s very much not your average white-linen period piece.
Heralded by controversy, Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein portrait, Maestro, raised worries over Cooper’s prosthetic nose – which the Anti-Defamation League and Bernstein’s family agreed was not remotely antisemitic. If the makeup wasn’t damagingly distracting, the fussy stylistic flamboyance sometimes was, as was Cooper’s effusive performance – both more than a touch self-regarding. But the film takes a bracingly elliptical approach to its subject, smartly eschewing the greatest hits approach to Bernstein’s career. It’s also nonjudgmental about his sexual hedonism, while very much presenting things from the viewpoint of his wife, Felicia Montealegre, increasingly squeezed into a corner by the maestro’s excessive energies. She’s played by Carey Mulligan, giving a fabulously sharp, finely hued performance that was a standout of the festival and an all-out personal best.
As a biopic, Maestro was more convincing than Coppola’s Priscilla, based on the memoir of Priscilla Presley, ex-wife of Elvis. Cailee Spaeny is affectingly reserved in the lead, opposite a similarly downplayed Jacob Elordi, but the film has an upmarket TV movie feel, and despite impeccable period detail never transcends its gilded-cage premise. It comes across as a portrait of two rather dull people living a dull life, except that one of them is a pop deity, the other a shy, baffled teenager.
Among the mainstream pleasures, there was Nikolaj Arcel’s Bastarden (AKA The Promised Land), essentially an 18th-century Scandi western, with Mads Mikkelsen tight-lipped and square-jawed as a soldier attempting to cultivate the bleak expanses of Jutland. It was one of the most compelling straight-ahead narratives here, along with David Fincher’s The Killer. The latter stars Michael Fassbender as a professional assassin, ruthless, invisible and silent – except when delivering the extended voiceover monologue of the opening sequences. When a job in Paris goes wrong (perhaps he’s distracted by his own existential cogitations), he embarks on a revenge mission, executed with the same icy perfectionism that Fincher brings to his direction. Mixing a touch of Hong Kong actioner with the glacial cool of French thriller maestro Jean-Pierre Melville, this is gold-standard genre stuff – and you even get Tilda Swinton telling a bear joke.
Two veteran invitees were not welcome in everyone’s eyes – Roman Polanski and Woody Allen, both greeted by protests against their inclusion. The big surprise was that Allen, who for the past few years has barely been phoning it in, has regained some spark by making a film in French. A Parisian love-triangle comedy that takes a very dark turn, Coup de Chance was surprisingly brisk, featured canny performances from Melvil Poupaud and rising star Lou de Laâge, and got the biggest laugh of the fest with its twist ending. As for Polanski, while recent films have upheld his maestro status – notably period drama An Officer and a Spy, which premiered in Venice in 2019 – The Palace was awful beyond imagining. A joyless Eurotrash farce set in a Swiss hotel on New Year’s Eve 1999, it involves a cast of grotesques including a vulgar financier (Mickey Rourke), an ancient Texas millionaire (John Cleese, depressing) and a group of elderly cosmetic surgery casualties. It’s relentlessly crass and mean-spirited, and the supposedly luxurious interiors look more like a Travelodge marked for renovation.
Some of the competition films were very much in a state-of-the-world mode, to mixed effect. Japan’s Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, an Oscar winner for his magnificent Drive My Car, offered the enigmatic Evil Does Not Exist, a rural drama about some city slickers who come to a quiet village to open a glamping site. Partly about the callousness of capitalist enterprise, partly a tone poem on the mystical majesty of nature, the film is immensely alluring and graceful, but divided audiences with its baffling, low-lit ending, which had everyone squinting as night and fog cloaked the final mysteries.
Polish duo Malgorzata Szumowska and Michal Englert offered Woman of …, a creditable but solemn trans drama that was less eloquent about its protagonist’s transitioning than about that of post-communist Poland. Then there was Origin, by Selma director Ava DuVernay, the first African American woman to have a film in competition here. It’s an ambitious, serious-minded, even scholarly film about writer Isabel Wilkerson (played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) and the genesis of her 2020 book Caste, which aimed to shed a new light on definitions of racism. It’s strongly acted – not least in a terrific monologue by Audra McDonald – but dramatically clunky, while its recreations of historical atrocity in Germany, India and the US have a high-production lavishness that verges on kitsch.
Then there were two big films about the refugee crisis. One with particular relevance to Italian audiences, especially given prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s policies, is Io Capitano by Gomorrah director Matteo Garrone. It’s about two naive young men from Senegal (Seydou Sarr, Moustapha Fall, both terrific) who buy a passage to Europe but run into horrors including exploitation, abandonment in the Sahara and torture by the Libyan mafia. It’s urgent and beautifully directed – but arguably too beautiful, with its glossy vistas of desert sands, and overall too crafted an artefact to be truly compelling, or to feel authentic.
By contrast, Green Border, by veteran Polish director Agnieszka Holland, is the works: hardcore, heavyweight and intensely imposing. It’s set on the frontier between Belarus and Poland, where border forces executing punitive and bitterly inhumane tactics shunt desperate refugees from one country to the other, over and over. With its vast, utterly compelling ensemble cast, Green Border covers events from the points of view of the refugees (notably Syrians), the Polish border patrol and the activists trying to help at considerable risk to themselves. At two and a half hours, this immensely angry film doesn’t lose your attention for a second. Earlier last week, it seemed a safe bet that the competition jury – headed by Damien Chazelle and including Jane Campion, Martin McDonagh and documentarist Laura Poitras – would give top award the Golden Lion to Poor Things for sheer vim and invention. But if they’re feeling cinematically and politically serious, then the searing, authoritative Green Border must surely be the frontrunner.
The best of Venice 2023
Best in competition
Green Border; Poor Things; The Theory of Everything.
Best performances
The ensemble cast of Green Border; Emma Stone in Poor Things; Carey Mulligan in Maestro.
Best comedies
Quentin Dupieux’s Daaaaaali!, a rollicking tribute to surrealism’s moustachioed maestro; Richard Linklater’s crisply scripted Hit Man, about a philosophy teacher turned fake assassin and undercover police agent.
Best music
British musician Jerskin Fendrix for the uncategorisable soundscapes of Poor Things; Diego Ramos Rodriguez for the retro lushness of The Theory of Everything.
British breakthroughs
Two first-time feature directors provided fresh, counterintuitive digressions from the usual social-realist baseline. In Luna Carmoon’s Hoard, a hoarder’s daughter embarks on a very dysfunctional relationship with an older man: actors Saura Lightfoot Leon and Joseph Quinn go the distance and then some. And Moin Hussain’s Sky Peals follows a troubled loner (Faraz Ayub) around the glacially eerie environs of a motorway service area.
Best comebacks
David Fincher, Michael Fassbender and Seven screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, the dream team behind The Killer; and posthumously, William Friedkin in his masterly, bare-bones courtroom drama The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial.
The 2023 great-idea-on-paper award…
… goes to US whiz-kid-as-was Harmony Korine with Aggro Dr1ft, his experimental hitman drama featuring rapper Travis Scott. Shot with thermal cameras, its violently hued imagery had viewers scratching their heads and reaching for the eyedrops.
