There is life beyond Netflix, although it is increasingly difficult to find it. The official selection of Venice 80 saw how some of its most interesting proposals were literally swallowed up by the productions that aspire to Oscar, with those sponsored by the platform in question at the head.
On Thursday, when everything seemed abandoned to its fate on the Lido, the competition offered a strange and dazzling transcendental or mystical tale disguised as an adolescent drama. Or vice versa. ‘Holly‘ is the story of a girl with powers capable of healing people. When a fire destroys her school and several of her classmates die, only she will be able to find peace and comfort. The Belgian director Find Through will manage from this peculiar and dreyeriana premise to compose a beautiful poem with a dirty face about loss, mourning, hopelessness and, much less abstractly, the injustice of an unequal society, of streets full of immigrants and too many lonely people. The young actress Cathalina Geeraerts He draws with his eyes completely open and with a precision that scares the exact size of each abyss we step on. Without a doubt, a film destined to give a lot to talk about. And what to suffer from.
In the Frenchman’s new job Bertrand Bonello, cinema unfolds before the viewer’s eyes as a mesmeric exercise, like a hypnosis session, like a fantastic fairy tale that is actually provocation and dream. Loosely based on Henry James’ novellaThe beast in the junglethe film tells the story between dystopia and a woman’s fever (Léa Seydoux) willing to erase from herself and her DNA all traces of emotion. A classic of the future perfect. The delicate process will put you in contact with your past lives in 1910, 2024 and 2044. With them and with a recurring love (George MscKay) that reappears sometimes as a gift and other times as a punishment. The director turns the texture of the film into the simultaneously recognizable and perfectly strange setting of a nightmare. And from there, Bonello builds a labyrinth-shaped story as obsessive and delirious as it is magnetic. And, so that nothing is missing, there is even a disconcerting moral. The festival scene is found in this film: shot underwater, two bodies searching for and desiring each other drown. Memorable. The result is a contemporary, romantic, merciless and so strange fable that it could be said to be the highest expression of Bonello himself. (It was covered by ‘The Killer‘, by David Fincher).
“As if Hitchcock and Lynch were making love under the carpet of an old Swiss hotel.” This is how the German defines, not without a certain presumption Tim Kroeger his second film. And for the sake of leaving what is good and, in fact, in its right place, well and in its place, there is no choice but to agree with him. ‘The Theory of Everything‘ is a film that wants to be above all a necessarily altered state of the soul. And as such it behaves with a devilish and happy narrative in each of its circumlocutions that navigates over an essentially obsessive soundtrack. It narrates the trip to an old hostel in the Swiss Alps of a group of physicists, all quantum, on the verge of finding the most disproportionate of the errors that order and disorder time, space and matter. Shot in a black and white that literally drills into the retinas, the film advances through the many alternative and contradictory worlds it proposes. And it does so with the awareness of being at the same time a comedy, a fantasy film, a war drama, a spy thriller and an exercise in old-fashioned style. As if Borges, Bolaño and Perec got together to celebrate (drunk) the end of the millennium to come. Or that it already was. (This was also covered by ‘The Killer‘, by David Fincher).
He ‘western‘, in addition to inventing cinema itself, is a state of mind. The border not only delimits the territory of the known but also defines the space of desire. Adventure, in any of its forms, takes place just on the other side of the limits and the mission of any art form is to risk that territory populated exclusively by dragons. Hic sunt dracones. The danish Nikolaj Arcel He is clear about it and that is why he does not hesitate to dress a story that could well take place in Monument Valley as a period drama. From the hand of a huge Mads Mikkelsen, the director of ‘A Royal Affair’ tells the story of a declassed man confronted by the nobility. He is a soldier of the king, as well as the bastard son of a nobleman, who is determined to found a colony where no one has ever dared. And all this to achieve the honor, glory and title that stained blood denies him. That’s at the beginning. Then it will be a matter of civilization, humanity and conquest of the West, even if it is in the North. Without a doubt, a beautiful twist to, why not, ‘The Man Who Killed Liberty Valance’. Or almost. (She was buried directly by ‘The wonderful story of Henry Sugar’by Wes Anderson, and by ‘Poor creatures’de Yorgos Lanthimos).