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      Sofia Coppola Makes It Look Easy. It Isn’t.

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      Sofia Coppola is so drawn to the idea of becoming that she sometimes finds it hard to grasp that she became. Over eight feature films — including her latest, “Priscilla,” about the young Priscilla Presley’s tumultuous relationship with Elvis — she has delved deeply into the liminal stage that is a young woman’s coming-of-age. So you can hardly blame Coppola that after staying in that head space for so long, it comes as a surprise that 25 years have passed since filming her debut feature, “The Virgin Suicides.”“It’s weird to reflect back at having a body of work,” she told me. “Like, ‘Oh, you’re a grown-up now and actually established, not just starting off.’”It was a sunny October afternoon in Los Angeles, and we were sitting on a restaurant terrace at the Academy Museum, where the 52-year-old director had come to tout “Priscilla” and autograph copies of “Sofia Coppola Archive,” a new art book assembled from the boxes of letters, photographs and reference images she had collected throughout her career. After the signing, she participated in a conversation moderated by members of the academy’s teen council, who asked Coppola questions about screenwriting and style as a form of self-expression.Teenagers and young women are still her demographic sweet spot, and Coppola, who is now the mother of two teenage daughters, met the young moderators’ queries with encouragement. “These are such good questions from the teen council, right?” she said to the audience. Many of the people attending the panel had come dressed to impress her, though Coppola was simply attired in a navy T-shirt with black trousers and ballet flats, her fingernails painted the same light-pink hue as the cover of her book.The director has released an art book, “Sofia Coppola Archive,” that compiles letters, photos and reference images. She herself has become an inspiration for younger artists.OK McCausland for The New York TimesIn a profession where so many directors are chatty, high-strung neurotics, Coppola is the picture of placidity. But her even keel shouldn’t be mistaken for a lack of caring. In a letter to Bill Murray included in “Archive,” Coppola describes a low moment when it seemed Murray couldn’t be reached to star in “Lost in Translation” (2003) and friends coaxed her out to dinner to consider other options. They soon found that her personal investment in Murray’s casting was more fraught than they could have known. “I broke down in tears at the restaurant (something I never do),” Coppola wrote.This is all to say that Coppola is so serene — and her films, at their best, so sublime — that people may assume it all comes easily to her. (That she hails from a filmmaking family led by a titanic father, Francis Ford Coppola, can only further that notion.) But over the course of our lunch, Coppola was candid about the issues she faces this far into her Oscar-winning career. Making movies the way she wants remains so difficult that all the recent genuflection — like the moment early in our lunch when a young fan with a “Virgin Suicides” shoulder bag came over to praise Coppola for being “such a light” — can still catch her off guard.“To be treated with that kind of respect, it’s surreal,” Coppola said. “Maybe that’s why I’m surprised when I’m in this context, because I’m still fighting to get movies made and getting budgets cut. I don’t think I’m professionally treated in the way that I am when I encounter these young people.”Early in her career, she was told that while women would go to a film starring men, the reverse wasn’t true. Though the prevailing attitude in Hollywood has evolved somewhat since then — or at least executives have learned to stop saying the quiet part out loud — Coppola still faces plenty of skepticism when trying to budget any female-fronted project. “The people in charge of giving money are usually straight men, still,” she said. “There’s always people in lower levels who are like myself, but then the bosses have a certain sensibility.”On the press tour for “Priscilla,” young women keep telling Coppola that they plan to be filmmakers, too. Their ambition gives her hope, though it’s tempered by two and a half decades of experience, including the tough battles she fought to save her new movie.“If it’s so hard for me to get financing as an established person, I worry about younger women starting out,” she said. “It’s surprising that it’s still a struggle.”Cailee Spaeny as Priscilla Presley. The movie’s budget was cut at the last minute and Coppola had to adjust.Sabrina Lantos/A24COPPOLA FIRST THUMBED through Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir, “Elvis and Me,” as a vacation read years ago. Expecting little more than a fun page-turner, she found herself unexpectedly riveted by Priscilla’s predicament: Like the title character of Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette,” she was a teenager who married into royalty, then found herself trapped in a palace that offered everything and nothing. To Coppola, who was just 18 when she gave a harshly criticized performance in her father’s film “The Godfather Part III,” Priscilla’s feeling of being scrutinized by an entire country at such a formative age was all too relatable.Still, it took some time for the story to click into place. Coppola had gone into 2020 readying her biggest project ever, an adaptation of “The Custom of the Country,” Edith Wharton’s 1913 novel, as a five-hour limited series for Apple TV+. But though the streamer has a reputation for spending big on prestige projects, Coppola said executives there weren’t keen on the lead character, the ambitious social climber Undine Spragg, and began to tighten their purse strings accordingly. (Apple did not respond to requests for comment.)“The idea of an unlikable woman wasn’t their thing,” Coppola noted. “But that’s what I’m saying about who’s in charge.”A friend prodded her to find something new to direct, and while laid up in bed for a week with Covid, Coppola took another look at “Elvis and Me” and suddenly saw with crystal clarity how it could work as a film. Even though Baz Luhrmann had just gone into production on the glitzy biopic “Elvis,” Coppola was undaunted: She figured if his version became a hit — and it did, grossing $288 million worldwide and earning eight Oscar nominations — then it would only juice interest in Priscilla’s side of the story.Coppola called up Presley, who had been a fan of hers since “Lost in Translation,” and after careful wooing, the 78-year-old came aboard the project as an executive producer. On the advice of her frequent collaborator Kirsten Dunst, Coppola hired Cailee Spaeny, best known for “Mare of Easttown” and “Pacific Rim: Uprising,” to play Priscilla from ages 14 to 28. Casting Elvis was harder: The real-life icon left impossibly big shoes to fill, and Luhrmann’s leading man, Austin Butler, was about to be Oscar-nominated for his robust spin on the role. Coppola wanted her film to show Elvis’s darker, domestic side, and to play him, she selected the fast-rising Australian actor Jacob Elordi from the HBO series “Euphoria.”“A lot of those movies didn’t get seen,” Coppola said, referring to her earlier work, “and that they are so watched now by a young generation, it’s cool that they speak to them.”OK McCausland for The New York TimesThe project was coming together quickly, but on a tight budget that allowed little room for error. Luhrmann had made “Elvis” for $85 million and Coppola had less than a quarter of that to spend on a lavish period piece that would span a decade and a half and recreate 1960s Memphis in wintry Toronto. Then, just before the film’s start date last October, a key piece of financing fell through. To save “Priscilla,” which was now $2 million short of its budget, Coppola and the producer Youree Henley were faced with an impossible task: An entire week would have to be cut from the film’s already slim shoot. With so little to work with, would “Priscilla” fall apart just as Coppola’s Apple series had?“We were like, ‘If we hold hands and jump out of the plane together, we’ll just figure it out as we’re descending,’” said Henley, who huddled with Coppola to slash 10 pages from the script.“It was one of the hardest things I ever had to do,” Coppola said about the mad scramble to make “Priscilla” work in just 30 days. Though the completed film feels refined and delicate, the shoot was anything but, since key locations were only briefly available and hairstyles, clothing and character ages changed radically between scenes. On the first day of shooting, Spaeny played Priscilla as a teenager graduating from high school; on the second, she shot the final scene as a single mother in her late 20s emerging from the gates of Graceland.It’s a wonder any of it tracks, except that Coppola’s sensibility is so specific, and her actors so eager to please her, that each scene feels distinctly of a piece. At its Venice Film Festival premiere in early September, the film received strong reviews and secured Spaeny the Volpi Cup for best actress, while an emotional Priscilla Presley told Coppola, “You did your homework.”“I still can’t believe our movie came together,” Coppola said now. And though mounting it was difficult, she recalled that while on set, she was in her element like never before.“In the beginning, I was just kind of figuring it out,” she admitted, speaking of her career. “And now, making this film ‘Priscilla,’ I felt like, ‘Oh, I know how to do this.’ All the years of experience start to gel.”LATER IN THE LUNCH, we were interrupted by a 25-year-old who hoped that Coppola would sign her book. She had on the sort of frilly dress that Marie Antoinette would have gone gaga for, with a constellation of arm tattoos that snaked out from underneath her lace sleeves.“My name is Sofia,” the fan said shyly. “I’m named after you.”With a quavering voice, the young woman explained that when her parents immigrated from Panama, Coppola’s movies were among the first they watched. That’s how she got her name and accrued, over time, the desire to follow her idol into filmmaking. “You have no idea the impact you’ve had on my life,” the second Sofia said, a tear running down her cheek.Coppola, who said she lived and worked in a “little bubble,” is always surprised when she meets people who connect this strongly to her work. “A lot of those movies didn’t get seen, and that they are so watched now by a young generation, it’s cool that they speak to them,” she told me.She remembered that Paramount Classics was cautious about releasing “The Virgin Suicides” in the spring of 2000 — “They thought girls were going to kill themselves if they saw it” — and that for a while after it came out, she watched her male contemporaries (including her then-husband, Spike Jonze) book plenty of jobs she wasn’t getting.“I’m still fighting to get movies made and getting budgets cut,” Coppola said.OK McCausland for The New York TimesMaybe it took the world some time to catch up. Though “Archive” is full of photos that Coppola has used for inspiration, Coppola’s own work now seems like the mood board for any number of artists, from the photographer Petra Collins to the singer Lana Del Rey. On television, you can detect the influence of her anachronistic take on “Marie Antoinette” in high-spirited historical remixes like “Bridgerton” and “The Great,” while Coppola often trends on TikTok, much to the annoyance of her daughters, Romy and Cosima, the only teenage girls who aren’t especially impressed by her oeuvre. “They think I’m lame,” Coppola said, though when 16-year-old Romy posted a clever viral TikTok this year, many wondered if she might follow in her mother’s footsteps as a filmmaker.A line can also be drawn from Coppola’s early work to the films of Greta Gerwig. They are two of only seven women to be nominated for the best director Oscar, and both got those nods early in their careers: Coppola was nominated at 32 for “Lost in Translation,” which won her the Oscar for original screenplay, while Gerwig got her directing nomination at 34 for “Lady Bird” (2017). Does Coppola think the blockbuster success of Gerwig’s “Barbie” could help more female-fronted projects find financing?“I’m sure it’ll make things easier, but that’s a very specific kind of filmmaking with, I would imagine, a lot of executives involved,” she said. “So that’s a different thing.”Coppola isn’t especially interested in directing blockbusters, though she once tried to mount a big-screen take on “The Little Mermaid” for Universal and was briefly courted for the final “Twilight” film. “I’ve never expected to be mainstream,” she said. “The culture that I always liked growing up was the side culture.” All she really wants is the ability to tell her stories with the budgets that befit them, and with people around who support her sensibility.But in the era of the comic-book tentpole, even that modest ask can be rejected as too much. Coppola meets frequently with the director Tamara Jenkins — she calls their friendship a “two-person ‘women in film’ coffee group” — to compare the battle scars they’ve earned from trying to get movies made: “We’re like, ‘It’s so hard. Why do we do this?’”Maybe that’s a question with no answer. Or maybe it’s an answer Coppola just has to keep relearning.“When you finish a project, you’re like, oh,” she said, as a Mona Lisa smile appeared on her face. “You have to do it, because it bugs you until you do.” More

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      Hollywood Gala Will Welcome Striking Stars, but Not Studio Bosses

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      How will the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures put on its star-studded fund-raiser this year, amid the polarizing strike? Very carefully.Meryl Streep, who was chosen to be honored at the gala next month for the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, was initially under the impression that the Hollywood actors’ strike would prevent her from attending.The strike, after all, had already forced the Academy to delay one gala in November, where Angela Bassett and Mel Brooks were to receive honorary Oscars. In the case of the fund-raising event planned for Oct. 14, it was unclear at first if SAG-AFTRA, the union representing TV and movie actors, would allow striking members to attend, and, if it did, whether any would want to go.Would it be OK to appear at such a celebratory event while the industry is on the ropes? Should actors sit at tables (costing $250,000 to $500,000) that in some cases are paid for by the studios they are striking against? And what about the potential for vitriol and tension, or at least deep social awkwardness?But after negotiations and quiet diplomacy that determined who could attend and what kinds of work could be honored, the gala — which typically attracts Hollywood’s A-listers and moguls and raises more than $10 million for the popular museum — will proceed. The biggest change: Executives from the studios being struck, some of which are among the museum’s biggest sponsors, will not be there.Streep will be, though, since she has approval from her union. “I have been assured that SAG-AFTRA has encouraged members to attend the gala — that the museum deeply depends on this event for its educational and community outreach, and that no industry executives from struck companies will be in attendance,” she said in an email. “So I am steaming my dress and heading West.”Meryl Streep, armed with permission from the actors’ union to attend the gala where she is being honored, said, “I am steaming my dress and heading West.” Arturo Holmes/Getty ImagesStreep’s initial confusion is emblematic of the fraught territory that the industry finds itself in as it tries to navigate the dos and don’ts of the strike — from awards shows and fund-raisers to social events, films and television shows.It can be confusing: Some talk show hosts have stumbled in trying to do decide whether to return to the air, and the writers’ union picketed “Dancing With the Stars” although its cast had received a green light from SAG-AFTRA to work. The tentative deal reached Sunday by the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers was a hopeful sign, but the actors remain on strike, and securing their union’s blessing was crucial for the Academy gala.“The basic guidance we’ve given people is, so long as it is not focused on a particular project or a particular struck company, it’s OK for our members to participate in those events and to acknowledge someone’s body of work,” Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the national executive director and chief negotiator of the actors’ union, said in an interview. “There will be members who choose not to participate in these things who don’t feel it’s the right thing to do at this point, since it is a serious time for people who work in the industry. I imagine our members will make judgments for themselves.”The gala is vital for the nascent museum, in an effort to raise millions of dollars and the institution’s profile. The event’s knack for drawing bold-faced names has led some to think of it as a West Coast Met Gala. The question this year is whether the lack of studio executives, and qualms on the part of striking actors, could make this year’s party less buoyant or its red carpet less buzzy.But assuming the honorees show up as planned, there will be guaranteed star power present: In addition to Streep, the Academy will honor Oprah Winfrey, Michael B. Jordan, and Sofia Coppola. The chairs of the gala, which is raising money for exhibitions, education and public programs, are the director Ava DuVernay, the actor Halle Berry, the producer Ryan Murphy and the producer Dr. Eric Esrailian, a physician and a trustee.Oprah Winfrey is being honored for her “exemplary leadership and support” of the museum. Roy Rochlin/Getty Images“This event is about raising vital funds to ensure that this work will go on in service to the public,” said Jacqueline Stewart, who last year became the museum’s director and president. “The work of the museum is a common ground despite the strikes.”Behind the scenes, union representatives have been in discussions with the museum to set certain ground rules: Individual actors can be honored, but not individual projects, and bodies of work can be highlighted, but not specific films, studios or streaming services. If the gala ventures out of bounds, Crabtree-Ireland said, members will be expected to get up and leave to avoid incurring disciplinary measures.Stewart said that no guests had declined invitations citing the strike as a reason. While some studios have contributed funds to the gala, she said, “given the particular circumstances this year, there will be no executives from struck companies in attendance.” The majority of table and ticket buyers are not from the studios, the museum said, but are a mix of corporate supporters, philanthropists, and museum trustees.Some union members hope that the museum gala can be an opportunity to highlight the labor dispute, which was prompted by concerns about pay, artificial intelligence and working conditions and which has halted virtually all production.“I get that the optics are bad when some of our members are walking the picket line and others are putting on black tie and jewels and walking the red carpet,” said Greg Cope White, who had to pause production on a Netflix adaptation of his memoir — for which he is also a screenwriter — “The Pink Marine,” about a gay 18-year-old who joins the U.S. Marine Corps.“The gala is an opportunity to get some attention to our cause,” White added. “Meryl Streep and Oprah are great speakers. Hopefully they’ll give passionate sound bites that will bring some light to us.”The Academy Museum opened in 2021, and has become a popular attraction. Tanveer Badal for The New York TimesEach honoree will receive a different award — Streep, for her “global cultural impact”; Jordan for “helping to contextualize and challenge dominant narratives around cinema”; Winfrey for her “exemplary leadership and support” of the museum; and Coppola for innovations that “have advanced the art of cinema.”After numerous delays, the Academy Museum finally opened in 2021, a seven-story, $484 million concrete-and-glass spherical building designed by the architect Renzo Piano that was widely welcomed as an example of the city’s cultural fertility. An exhibition dedicated to John Waters, the cult filmmaker who directed “Pink Flamingos,” “Polyester” and “Hairspray,” opened there on Sept. 17.Although the gala is approaching fast, some actors and writers remain hopeful that the strike will be resolved by the time the limousines start to roll down Wilshire Boulevard. “If I could open the envelope at the Oscars,” White said, “It would say, ‘Strike is over.’” More

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      At Venice Film Festival, Trapped Women and Controlling Men

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      This year’s lineup includes films from Sofia Coppola, Yorgos Lanthimos and Bradley Cooper in which female characters squirm under the thumbs of egocentric men.The press room at the Venice Film Festival has to be the most beautiful film festival press room in the world. Taking over the third floor of the imposing Palazzo del Casinò, the main atrium is a gargantuan, triple-height space carpeted in soft cream, with columns clad in marble extending up past Murano glass chandeliers, and floor-to-ceiling windows hung with gold-sheened drapes giving way to a sparkling blue sea. On a clear day — which it almost always is — you imagine that, were it not for the curvature of the earth, you could see forever. Or at least to Croatia.It is an eternal contradiction that this lofty space should be peopled with dozens of perspiring journalists hunched over their laptops, hammering away at their keyboards like birds beating their wings against the bars of a particularly gilded cage. Or maybe such dark thoughts in a such a light-filled structure — designed by the architect Eugenio Miozzi in 1938 to embody the monumentalist fantasy of Mussolini’s fascist regime — are a symptom of a festival lineup that, this year, features a profusion of stories about women similarly chafing against the restrictive, but often luxurious, enclosures built by controlling men.Some of these men were towering real-life figures. Penélope Cruz turns in the standout performance in Michael Mann’s “Ferrari” as the long-suffering wife of the Italian motoring magnate (Adam Driver), and Carey Mulligan does much the same as Leonard Bernstein’s wife Felicia in “Maestro,” directed by and starring Bradley Cooper. In both these cases — and arguably to the detriment of both well-made but strangely evanescent films — the portrayal of genius pales in comparison to the portrait of a woman who supported and nurtured that genius, even when it threatened to engulf her. in “Ferrari,” Penélope Cruz plays Laura Ferrari, the wife of the Italian car mogul Enzo Ferrari.Lorenzo SistiOf two memorable scenes in “Maestro,” only one — Bernstein’s performance of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony at Ely Cathedral in 1973 — is about his music. The other is a lacerating domestic argument in the couple’s bedroom, during which, in every shaking nerve, Mulligan embodies the resentment of a bright, ambitious woman whose devotion to and indulgence of her famous spouse has cost her so much of herself.The life-draining capacity of egocentric men is even more strikingly literalized in Pablo Larraín’s mordant, monochrome “El Conde,” in which the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet (Jaime Vadell) is recreated as a 250-year-old vampire. In Larraín’s scabrous, grisly alternate history, Pinochet is a decrepit immortal, drowning in self-pity since faking his death to evade justice. And Pinochet’s wife Lucía (Gloria Münchmeyer) is imagined as his equal, or even his better, in sheer perversity; much of the misery the terrorized nation experienced under the dictator is suggested to have been at her behest.But although that gives Lucía, who constantly petitions her husband to bite her so that she too can live out her depravities forever, a degree of apparent agency, that is robbed from her in one brief scene where “The Count,” as he likes to be called, casually trades her off to his obsequious Renfield-style butler (Alfredo Castro). The Count is then free to pursue an affair with a nun, including fantasy play that involves her dressing up as Marie Antoinette. (The Count has been obsessed with the ill-fated Queen of France ever since, in one of the film’s most provocatively gruesome early scenes, he licked the guillotine blade that severed her slender neck.)Marie Antoinette is perhaps the ultimate emblem of decorative married womanhood. And of course, she was the title star of a previous film from Sofia Coppola, whose Venice-competing “Priscilla” is yet another tale of a woman’s tentatively self-engineered escape from the influence of a dominant man.Jacob Elordi and Cailee Spaeny as Elvis and Priscilla Presley in “Priscilla.”Philippe Le SourdBased on, and clearly in deep sympathy with, Priscilla Presley’s memoir “Elvis and Me,” the film follows the famous couple’s relationship, from their first meeting when then-Priscilla Beaulieu (Cailee Spaeny) was just 14 years old and living on a U.S. Army base in Germany, to the moment, almost a decade-and-a-half later, when Priscilla Presley drove through the gates of Graceland for the last time as the house’s mistress.This is unmistakably a Sofia Coppola movie, in its luxuriant feel for fabrics and facades, but as in “Marie Antoinette,” here the surfaces become the substance. It is a story about how, especially to a naïve teenager, the trappings of an outwardly tantalizing lifestyle can be sprung upon you like a trap.During their first tearful goodbye in Germany, Elvis (Jacob Elordi) makes the schoolgirl Priscilla promise to “stay exactly the way you are.” But the banner film investigating the icky desire on the part of some men to keep their womenfolk infantilized is Yorgos Lanthimos’ joyously macabre “Poor Things.” The biggest hit of Venice so far, it is deeply — if twistedly, and often hilariously — concerned with the idea of female emancipation, as Bella, played by a riveting, inventive and highly physical Emma Stone, shucks off the psychological bondage first of her adoptive father (Willem Dafoe) and then of her caddish, pompous lover (Mark Ruffalo).Even the film’s hyperreal aesthetic, in which Lisbon and London are depicted by intricate, steampunky set-builds with lurid computer generated skies and seas, reinforce the concept: The film’s self-consciously airless and artificial universe makes the vigor of Bella’s adventures in sex and self-discovery all the more striking.In “Poor Things,” Emma Stone plays Bella, a woman trying to unburden herself from both her adoptive father and her vain lover.Yorgos Lanthimos/Searchlight PicturesThere are still more women trapped under the thumbs of domineering men dotted throughout the lineup, most notably in two black comedies that both feature contract killers (another feature of Venice 2023, if you also take David Fincher’s “The Killer,” Harmony Korine’s “Aggro Dr1ft” and the Liam Neeson thriller “In the Land of Saints and Sinners” into further account).Richard Linklater’s “Hit Man” stars and is co-written by Glen Powell, who deserves to leap up to major-league stardom on the back of this effervescently amoral exaggeration of a real-life story: Gary, a diffident English professor who moonlights as a fake hit man, finds love getting in the way of his mission when an abused wife, Madison (Adria Arjona), tries to enlist his services. She is driven to it as a means to escape. But the murder-solicitation in Woody Allen’s French-language “Coup de Chance,” is far less morally defensible, prompted by jealousy and again, a loss of control, as the possessive rich-guy Jean (Melvil Poupaud), discovers that his young, vivacious wife (Lou De Laâge) has taken a lover.“Coup de Chance” is, in some respects a return to form for Allen, even if one suspects that some of its breeziness is down to the attractive cast compensating for the staleness of Allen’s recent English-language quippery by mercifully speaking in French. (Native French speakers of my acquaintance tell me that the dialogue, to their ears, sounds similarly unnatural.)But it does feel more current than most of Allen’s recent output, not least in how it syncs up neatly with this Venice edition’s chief preoccupations: hit men and trapped women, and all the poor things who find themselves in plush Central Park or central Paris apartments, in press room palaces or fantastical Lisbon hotels, surrounded by luxury, but longing to be free. More

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      Venice Film Festival Finds Drama Without Zendaya

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      Day 1 brought challenges but not “Challengers,” the film that had been scheduled to open this usually starry event until it was delayed by the strikes.The sky in Venice wept on Wednesday, for there were no pictures to be taken of Zendaya in couture clambering from a speedboat.No? Too much? Well, it’s hard not to sound melodramatic at a film festival where the movies are big but the mood swings are even bigger. Let me clear my throat, take a swig of this Aperol spritz, and start again …The 80th edition of the Venice Film Festival kicked off on this rainy Wednesday with several big-name auteurs in attendance but few of the stars that this event has come to count on. With dual strikes by the writers and actors guilds forcing a Hollywood shutdown, and the actors forbidden from promoting studio films during the labor action, Venice will inaugurate a fall film season that is still in significant flux.The first day was meant to be turbocharged by the presence of Zendaya, who turned heads here two years ago in a series of stunning dresses while publicizing the first installment of “Dune.” But the shutdown cost Venice the new film she stars in, Luca Guadagnino’s “Challengers,” in which she plays a tennis pro who has to make a romantic choice between two best friends, played by Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist (the cheeky marketing materials tease that on at least one night, she chooses both).Without its lead available to support the film, MGM delayed the release of “Challengers” to spring 2024 and yanked it from the Venice lineup. Taking its place as the festival’s opening-night film was “Comandante,” a World War II film told from the point of view of Italian submariners. While it’s well-shot and full of suspenseful battle sequences, “Comandante” features exactly zero tennis hotties contemplating a threesome, which may hinder its ultimate appeal with a Venice audience that was promised starry romantic high jinks.Though the festival’s artistic director, Alberto Barbera, admitted at a news conference on Wednesday that the likes of Emma Stone (“Poor Things”) and Bradley Cooper (“Maestro”) will not be attending Venice because of the strike, other actors who hail from more independent productions have managed to secure guild waivers, including “Ferrari” star Adam Driver, “Memory” lead Jessica Chastain, and the cast of Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla.” They’re expected to show up on the Lido this week alongside a posse of high-powered directors that includes David Fincher (“The Killer”), Ava DuVernay (“Origin”) and Richard Linklater (“Hit Man”).Still, the strikes loom large. At Barbera’s news conference, the jury president, the filmmaker Damien Chazelle (“La La Land”), dressed for maximum solidarity, donning a “Writers Guild on Strike!” shirt and a similar button on the lapel of his sport coat. He noted that as of Wednesday, the writers had been on strike for 121 days, with the actors joining them for the last 48 days, and he called on studios to compensate those artists fairly.“I think there’s a basic idea that each work of art has value unto itself, that it’s not just a piece of content, to use Hollywood’s favorite word right now,” Chazelle told reporters, adding that that idea “has been eroded quite a bit over the past 10 years. There’s many issues on the table with the strikes, but to me, that’s the core issue.”Chazelle was joined by the directors Martin McDonagh and Laura Poitras, who both wore shirts supporting the Writers Guild. They are part of a jury that includes the filmmakers Jane Campion and Mia Hansen-Love, among others.“I’m not sure I entirely deserve this spot, but I will do my best to live up to it,” Chazelle said. “I thank Mr. Barbera for his foolishness in letting me try it out.”Though Chazelle has been to Venice a few times before, to debut “La La Land” and his follow-up, “First Man,” he said he still found the place quite surreal. “That fact that you take a boat to a screening, it’s silly,” Chazelle said. “Cinema, to me, is a waking dream and that, to me, is Venice.”See what I said about melodrama? When you’re in Venice, where even the paint peels in the most picturesque way, you just can’t help yourself from indulging. That’s how your columnist felt last night in the rain, mulling over two of the worst disasters to hit Italy in quite some time: St. Mark’s Square was flooded, and there was no Zendaya. But at least the sun will come out tomorrow here, as will the new films by Michael Mann and Wes Anderson. More

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      Venice Film Festival 2023: What to Watch For

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      New films from David Fincher, Sofia Coppola, Ava DuVernay and Michael Mann will make up for the absence of stars kept away by the Hollywood strikes.A year ago, the Venice Film Festival had enough star power to put even celebrity-worshiping Cannes on notice. Highlights were quickly beamed all over the world, including the notorious “Don’t Worry Darling” kickoff that fueled endless speculation about the film’s director, Olivia Wilde, and her stars Florence Pugh and Harry Styles; the news conference where an unexpectedly sagacious Timothée Chalamet predicted imminent societal collapse; and the tearful Brendan Fraser comeback that began on the Lido and culminated in his best actor Oscar win.But without all of those celebrities, can Venice still go viral?The 80th edition of the festival, which begins on Wednesday, will be significantly affected by continuing strikes by the Screen Actors Guild (or SAG-AFTRA) and the Writers Guild of America, since the actors’ union has instructed its members not to do press for any studio movies until the strike against those companies is resolved. That puts Venice in a bind, as it’s regarded as one of the best places for Hollywood to unveil starry awards-season titles. Few major actors will even be permitted to attend this year.The actors’ strike has already cost Venice its original opening-night film, Luca Guadagnino’s sexy tennis romance, “Challengers,” since MGM delayed it from September to spring in the hopes that its lead, Zendaya, will be allowed to promote it several months from now when the strikes might be resolved. (A low-profile Italian film is opening instead.) And I’ve heard of a few more starry fall films that were earmarked for Venice but opted for the Telluride Film Festival instead, since that event is less driven by the photo ops and news conferences that are no longer feasible in Italy.Despite some of those trims, the Venice lineup is still enticing, with an auteur-heavy list featuring directors nearly as famous as their leads. And Venice has proved before that it can adapt to unfavorable limitations: Amid the pandemic in August 2020, the festival opted for a smaller, partly open-air edition that still went on to premiere the eventual winner of the best picture Oscar, “Nomadland.”Emma Stone, left, and Mark Ruffalo in “Poor Things,” from Yorgos Lanthimos. Atsushi Nishijima/Searchlight Pictures, via Associated PressThis year’s program includes two films about assassins-for-hire: David Fincher’s new thriller, “The Killer,” stars Michael Fassbender, while Richard Linklater’s “Hit Man” features the “Top Gun: Maverick” breakout Glen Powell, who also served as a co-writer. I’m curious about the off-kilter comedy “Poor Things,” directed by Yorgos Lanthimos (“The Favourite”) and starring Emma Stone as a sexually curious Frankenstein’s monster. Ditto “Maestro,” Bradley Cooper’s second directorial effort, after “A Star Is Born.” He’s cast himself as the composer Leonard Bernstein, opposite Carey Mulligan as Bernstein’s wife, Felicia, and his decision to wear a prosthetic nose has already set off controversy.Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” was a big hit last year, but what will that story look like through Sofia Coppola’s lens? The “Lost in Translation” and “Marie Antoinette” director puts her spotlight on Elvis Presley’s wife with “Priscilla,” featuring Cailee Spaeny as teen bride Priscilla Presley and the “Euphoria” star Jacob Elordi as the singer. Ava DuVernay has adapted the Isabel Wilkerson book “Caste” for her new film, “Origin,” which stars the Oscar nominee Aunjanue Ellis in an examination of racism and systemic oppression. And though Michael Mann has secured a guild exemption that would allow the cast of “Ferrari” to promote it in Venice, I’m curious whether his new film’s press-shy lead, Adam Driver (as the racer-turned-car-magnate Enzo Ferrari), is willing to do a full-blown media blitz for the movie, which the hot indie studio Neon is releasing in theaters on Christmas Day.Two years after the release of his Oscar-winning breakthrough “Drive My Car,” the director Ryusuke Hamaguchi returns to the festival circuit with “Evil Does Not Exist,” which originated as a dialogue-free short and became a feature-length film about ecological collapse. And two months after releasing his feature-length “Asteroid City,” the director Wes Anderson is opting for something shorter with “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” a 37-minute Roald Dahl adaptation for Netflix.Harmony Korine premiered his biggest film, “Spring Breakers,” at Venice back in 2012, and he’ll return with the mysterious “Aggro Dr1ft,” which stars the rapper Travis Scott and was shot solely using infrared photography. He’s not the only director taking chances: Pablo Larraín, the director of “Jackie” and “Spencer,” has set the divas aside for a moment to make “El Conde,” a black-and-white supernatural fable that reimagines the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet as a bloodsucking vampire.And then there are the chances that Venice itself is taking when it comes to three auteurs: It is premiering “Dogman” from Luc Besson, who was accused of sexual assault but cleared by prosecutors; “The Palace” from Roman Polanski, who was convicted of unlawful sex with a minor but fled before he could be sentenced; and “Coup de Chance” from Woody Allen, who has denied sexual abuse accusations by Dylan Farrow, his adopted daughter.Venice will also serve as an elegy of sorts for the director William Friedkin, who died earlier this month and whose final film, the naval drama “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial,” will premiere posthumously on the Lido. Adapted by Friedkin from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Herman Wouk, it stars Jake Lacy and Kiefer Sutherland. More