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    Marina Cicogna, Italy’s First Major Female Film Producer, Dies at 89

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    A countess from an influential Italian family, she charted her own course and produced films by the likes of Pasolini and Zeffirelli.Marina Cicogna, an Italian countess who became her country’s first major female film producer, guiding to the screen celebrated films by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Franco Zeffirelli and Elio Petri, died on Nov. 4 at her home in Rome. She was 89.Her death was announced by La Biennale di Venezia, the organizer of the Venice Film Festival. No cause was given.Rising to prominence in an era when the only female names on film posters were often those of actresses, Ms. Cicogna (pronounced chi-CONE-ya) became one of the most powerful women in European cinema, as both a producer and a distributor.She started from a lofty perch. Her maternal grandfather, Count Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata, was an industrialist and statesman who served various government roles, including as Italy’s minister of finance under Mussolini. He also founded the Venice Film Festival. In the mid-1960s, when Ms. Cicogna was in her early 30s, she and her brother Bino took control of her family’s production and distribution company, Euro International Films.Even so, she faced challenges: working with imperious male auteurs; earning the respect of the country’s left-leaning cultural leaders despite her titled upbringing; and openly dating women as well as men at a time when such topics were rarely discussed in public by figures of authority.Ms. Cicogna in 2009. She brought prominent films to the screen, including Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Medea” and “Teorema,” as well as Elio Petri’s “Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion,” which won the 1971 Academy Award for best foreign-language film.Nick Harvey/WireImage, via Getty ImagesNor was her path as a woman always easy. “At the time I didn’t think about it,” she said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter Roma this year. “But at the end of the day, yes, the intention to put you down was there, definitely.”Among the prominent films she produced or distributed were “Medea” (1969), Pasolini’s hypnotic reimagining of the Euripides tragedy, starring the opera singer Maria Callas; “Teorema” (1968), also directed by Pasolini, in which Terence Stamp plays an enigmatic stranger who seduces, one by one, members of a wealthy family in Milan; “Brother Sun Sister Moon” (1972), Zeffirelli’s lush retelling of the life of St. Francis of Assisi; and “Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion,” Petri’s Kafkaesque thriller, which won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film in 1971.Ms. Cicogna also had three films at the 1967 Venice Film Festival, including Luis Buñuel’s “Belle de Jour,” starring Catherine Deneuve as a Paris housewife who secretly works at a bordello, which won the festival’s highest prize, the Golden Lion. In addition, she put her stamp on the proceedings by throwing a lavish party that became festival lore.“I didn’t give a big ball, but rather said that everyone could dress as they wanted, as long as they were in white and yellow or white and gold,” Ms. Cicogna said in a 2013 interview with T, The New York Times’s style magazine. “I sent two small Learjets, one to Corsica to pick up Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and the other to Rome to pick up Jane Fonda and Roger Vadim.”Such obvious displays of wealth would go out of fashion following the leftist student uprisings in Europe in 1968. “You couldn’t have a big party without hurting people’s feelings,” she continued. “You couldn’t go around with a Rolls-Royce without being thrown eggs at.”Ms. Cicogna, center, with the actresses Gina Lollobrigida, left, and Jane Fonda at the lavish party the countess threw for the 1967 Venice Film Festival. The party became festival lore.Giorgio Lotti/Mondadori, via Getty ImagesCountess Marina Cicogna Mozzoni Volpi di Misurata was born on May 29, 1934, in Rome, the daughter of Count Cesare Cicogna Mozzoni, a banker, and Countess Annamaria Volpi di Misurata, who purchased Euro International Films, ultimately handing control over to her children.Growing up, Ms. Cicogna was a cinema lover who mingled among the children of David O. Selznick, the producer of “Gone With the Wind,” and other film heavyweights at the Venice festival.After an education in Italy, she enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., where she roomed with Barbara Warner, whose father was the Hollywood film mogul Jack Warner. During a school break, Ms. Warner invited her to California.“I never went back,” Ms. Cicogna told T. “I stayed for three months in California at the Warners’.”She later studied photography in the United States, brokering her platinum connections to shoot luminaries like Ezra Pound and Marilyn Monroe in candid moments.Her early forays into the film business included distributing a 1967 West German film, “Helga.” “It was the first time you saw a birth, a woman producing a child, on film,” she told T. “I decided we should publicize it. We put ambulances at the exit of the film, saying that people would faint when they saw that.”Ms. Cicogna in 1967 with the director Luis Buñuel, whose “Belle de Jour” won the Venice festival’s highest prize, the Golden Lion.Giorgio Lotti/Mondadori Portfolio, via Everett CollectionShe was at times linked romantically with the likes of Warren Beatty and Alain Delon, but she also spent decades in a relationship with Florinda Bolkan, a Brazilian model and actress.After they split, she began a long relationship with Benedetta Gardona, a woman more than two decades her junior, whom Ms. Cicogna legally adopted for financial reasons. Ms. Gardona remained her companion until Ms. Cicogna’s death. (Complete information on survivors was not immediately available).Ms. Cicogna looked back on her career highlights of the 1960s and ’70s in the 2021 documentary “Marina Cicogna: La Vita e Tutto il Resto” (“Life and Everything Else”), directed by Andrea Bettinetti, as well as her autobiography, “Ancora Spero: Una Storia di Vita e di Cinema” (“I Still Hope: A Story of Life and Cinema”), published this year.Still, in a 2017 video interview, she expressed regret that she had not remained in the film business. “If I had to look back, I should have never stopped producing, although Italian cinematography has not been the same since. It’s not so great,” she said, adding: “I am also a person who is very torn between the European rather lazy aesthetic way of life and the American more creative, more active way of life.”“I’ve been more European than active,” she said. “I haven’t done as much as I should have done. But I can’t say I’m sorry. That’s the way it was, and that’s it.” More

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      ‘Poor Things’ Takes Top Prize at Venice Film Festival

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      The film, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, stars Emma Stone as a woman who goes on a sexual and philosophical journey. The announcement of its win was met with a roar of applause.“Poor Things,” directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, was awarded the Golden Lion for best film at the 80th Venice International Film Festival on Saturday by a competition jury led by Damien Chazelle. The film stars Emma Stone in a virtuoso performance as a woman with an initially childlike understanding of the world who comes into her own through a sexual and philosophical journey.Bella Baxter, the main character in the film, “wouldn’t exist without Emma Stone,” Lanthimos said. “This film is her, in front of and behind the camera.” Stone previously collaborated with Lanthimos on “The Favourite,” which won the Grand Jury Prize at the festival in 2018.Like many other actors in films screened at the festival, Stone was not in attendance, as the strike by SAG-AFTRA, the union that represents television and movie actors, continued.Set in a partly fantastical 19th-century Europe, “Poor Things” follows Bella (Stone) on her eye-opening adventures in Tony McNamara’s adaptation of the 1992 Alasdair Gray novel. The film also stars Willem Dafoe as Bella’s father who is a doctor, Ramy Youssef as his assistant and her suitor, and Mark Ruffalo as a lascivious lawyer.Lanthimos said that the film took “quite a few years” to bring into being, before “the world, or our industry,” was ready for its story. The award announcement was met with a roar of applause.The 80th edition of the festival opened with “Comandante,” a historical drama about an Italian submarine that rescued Belgian sailors during World War II. Other prominent films included “Maestro,” “Priscilla,” “The Killer,” “Ferrari,” “Hit Man,” “Origin,” “El Conde,” “Aggro Dr1ft,” “Coup de Chance,” “Dogman” and William Friedkin’s final film, “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial.”The latest edition received wide acclaim despite advance speculation that the SAG-AFTRA and Writers Guild of America strikes in Hollywood might affect the festival’s impact. Stars were largely absent. However, there were exceptions, including Adam Driver and Jessica Chastain, thanks to interim agreements secured with SAG-AFTRA; both actors expressed support for the strikes. But the filmmakers did not disappoint: Before the awards ceremony, crowds chanted “Yorgos! Yorgos!” when the director walked onto the red carpet.The Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize went to “Evil Does Not Exist,” the new film from Ryusuke Hamaguchi, whose film “Drive My Car” won an Academy Award. His latest feature centers on a small town in Japan trying to fend off a planned glamping site.Immigration was a recurring theme among the prizewinners. The Silver Lion for best director went to Matteo Garrone for the immigration drama “Me Captain.” The Special Jury Prize went to Agnieszka Holland for “Green Border,” her multifaceted look at immigration to Poland.The Volpi Cup for best actress was awarded to Cailee Spaeny, who played the titular role in Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla,” the story of Priscilla Presley’s relationship with Elvis Presley. The best actor award went to Peter Sarsgaard for his role as a man with dementia who is accused of past abuse in Michel Franco’s “Memory.” In his acceptance speech, Sarsgaard spoke movingly against the threat of artificial intelligence. Seydou Sarr won the Marcello Mastroianni Award, given to an outstanding emerging actor, for “Me Captain.”The best screenplay honor was given to “El Conde,” a vampiric reimagining of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator, written by Guillermo Calderón and Pablo Larraín, who also directed. “Love Is a Gun,” directed by Lee Hong-Chi, received the Lion of the Future award for best debut feature. “Thank You Very Much,” a playful look at Andy Kaufman, won the Venice Classics award for best documentary on cinema.For the Orizzonti section, another competition slate in the festival, the top prize went to “Explanation for Everything,” an expansive work from the Hungarian director Gabor Reisz. “El Paraiso,” a mother-daughter drama, also won two awards in this section: Margarita Rosa de Francisco won for best actress, and Enrico Maria Artale won for best screenplay. Notably, a Mongolian film, “City of Wind,” was honored for best actor (Tergel Bold-Erdene).This year’s Golden Lions for lifetime achievement went to Tony Leung Chiu-wai, a star of Hong Kong cinema, and to the director Liliana Cavani, whose film “The Order of Time” played out of competition. The Glory to the Filmmaker Award went to Wes Anderson, whose short film “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar” played out of competition. 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: Emma Stone Is a Bizarro Barbie in ‘Poor Things’

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      In the wild new comedy from Yorgos Lanthimos (“The Favourite”), Stone plays a sexually questing woman with the mind of an infant.“What was I made for?”Though that’s a lyric crooned by Billie Eilish during the climax of “Barbie,” it could just as easily be a question asked by Bella Baxter, the protagonist of “Poor Things.” Played by Emma Stone in this new movie from the director Yorgos Lanthimos (“The Favourite”), Bella’s back story is a doozy: She’s a Frankenstein’s monster of sorts, saved after suicide when she’s discovered by a demented doctor (Willem Dafoe) who replaces her brain with the one of the unborn child growing inside her.And you thought Barbie’s creation myth was head-spinning!“Poor Things,” which premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Friday, often plays like a wild, art-house remix of Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster doll opus. It, too, is about a sheltered, childlike woman whose quest for knowledge forces her to venture out into the real world, where the complicated politics of gender both appall and fascinate her.But this is no family film: As baby-brained Bella starts to come of age, her lack of inhibitions steers her toward sexual situations that had the Venice moviegoer next to me squirming in his seat.Based on the book by Alasdair Gray and adapted by Tony McNamara (who co-wrote “The Favourite” for Lanthimos and Stone), “Poor Things” introduces Bella shortly after her brain-swap surgery, when she’s still under close observation by Dafoe’s Dr. Godwin Baxter, who has given her his last name, and his mild-mannered assistant McCandles (Ramy Youssef). Quite literally a child in a woman’s body, Bella can barely string words together and is given to shocking outbursts. Even gaining control of her limbs is a challenge: Bella lurches through Baxter’s mansion like a zombie dressed in drag, which I suppose she kind of is.Still, the two men are each beguiled by her, even though the lovestruck McCandles is intimidated by Bella’s dawning self-awareness and erotic curiosity. That presents an opening for the caddish lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), who promises to spring her from Baxter’s custody and smuggle her into the real world for a sexual education. But as Bella grows more independent and capable of sophisticated thoughts, all the men who initially spark to her free spirit become increasingly pathetic in their attempts to trap and keep her.Some Venice viewers have crowed that Stone’s go-for-broke character arc all but guarantees her a second Oscar, though I’d apply a lot of caveats to that prediction: This is a wild, eccentric movie full of explicit sex and violence, and older academy voters might bounce off “Poor Things” during the first 20 minutes.Still, the technical aspects of the film are absolutely worth rewarding. Like “Barbie,” it’s a marvel to look at, though the aesthetic is less “dream house” and more “naughty pop-up book.” Filmed with more fish-eye lenses than a Missy Elliott music video, it’s creatively costumed, too: Bella’s signature look — ruffed collar and Elizabethan sleeves on top, inappropriate bloomers on the bottom — is what you might get if you set a time-traveling Lena Dunham loose in the Renaissance.And for moviegoers who found the feminism of “Barbie” to be too introductory, “Poor Things” takes those themes to their R-rated extreme, interrogating gender dynamics and sexuality from nearly every angle (and since this is a Yorgos Lanthimos movie, you know those angles are canted). Bella’s quest for enlightenment will push her from plush suites to whorehouses, but the more hard-earned wisdom she accrues, the more the guys in her orbit will be found lacking. Why shouldn’t she try to remake society in her own image? After all, she’s Bella Baxter. They’re just Men. More

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      Venice Film Festival: Adam Driver Calls Out Netflix and Amazon Amid Strikes

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      His film “Ferrari,” a big-budget indie from Michael Mann, is the kind of adult drama the major studios have shied away from.The name placard on the dais said “A. Driver,” and if you’re making a Ferrari movie, you’d certainly better have one.This particular Driver happened to be in high demand at the Venice Film Festival, which bowed on Wednesday and has mostly had to make do without famous movie stars as the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike prohibits actors from promoting films made by most major studios. But since the new Michael Mann-directed film “Ferrari” will be released domestically by Neon and internationally by STX — two companies that aren’t members of the group that Hollywood guilds are striking against — its star, Adam Driver, was free to make the trip to Venice and add A-list appeal to a festival in dire need of it.“I’m proud to be here, to be a visual representation of a movie that’s not part of the A.M.P.T.P.,” Driver said on Thursday at the news conference for the film, referencing the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. He praised the interim agreement devised by SAG-AFTRA that allows stars to promote independent films as long as their distributors agree with the terms the actors’ guild is seeking.“Why is it that a smaller distribution company like Neon and STX International can meet the dream demands of what SAG is asking for — the dream version of SAG’s wish list — but a big company like Netflix and Amazon can’t?” asked Driver, who has previously promoted Netflix movies like “Marriage Story” and “White Noise” in Venice. “Every time people from SAG go and support movies that have agreed to these terms with the interim agreement, it just makes it more obvious that these people are willing to support the people they collaborate with, and the others are not.”After the crowd at the news conference applauded, Mann added, “No big studio wrote us a check. That’s why we’re here, standing in solidarity.”You wouldn’t think while watching it that “Ferrari” is an indie movie. With a reported budget of $95 million, this is the sort of lavish adult drama that Mann used to make for major studios all the time. But movies like “Heat,” “The Last of the Mohicans,” “Ali” and “The Insider,” all films Mann made in the 1990s or early 2000s, have fallen out of favor in our superhero-saturated era, and expensive prestige releases like this one have recently struggled to break out at the box office.Can the record-breaking success of Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” reinvigorate the sort of big-budget dad drama that used to be a theatrical staple? “Ferrari” is counting on it, even if its fellow December releases, like “Wonka” and “The Color Purple,” don’t necessarily lend themselves to “Barbenheimer”-level portmanteaus. (“Wonkari” and “Ferple” just sound like off-brand Pokemon.)Like Nolan’s summer hit, “Ferrari” is about a midcentury visionary with a wandering eye: Driver’s Enzo Ferrari is a racer-turned-automaker who’s feuding with his wife (Penélope Cruz), hiding a mistress (Shailene Woodley) and trying to save his namesake company before it goes belly up. Mann tracks him during the summer of 1957, when it seemed like so many of Ferrari’s problems could be fixed by a single, momentous race. If one of his drivers can win the dangerous, thousand-mile race Mille Miglia, Ferrari reasons, it would stoke enough demand to lift the company’s fortunes. Still, his single-minded pursuit of that goal turns out to be a life-or-death matter with all sorts of unexpected casualties.It may be hard now to conceive of “Ferrari” as a Driver-less vehicle, but over the many years that Mann tried to mount it, the director flirted with leading men like Robert De Niro, Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale, who went on to topline the Mann-produced “Ford v Ferrari” (2019). The 39-year-old Driver is called upon to play a man two decades older for most of the film’s running time, but that gray-haired intensity actually suits him: His Ferrari is hard-nosed and compelling, like a too-serious MSNBC commentator who slowly attracts an ardent, horny fan base.Regardless of whether “Ferrari” can chase the box-office success of “Oppenheimer,” Driver said it was a miracle it was made at all, summing up the film’s truncated production schedule and false starts in a way that his title character could understand.“It’s hard not to get philosophical about an engine — the amount of pieces that have to come together, similar to films, and work on the exact right timing in the exact right moment,” he said at the news conference. “And then there’s the element of human intuition and reflex. It’s a 50/50 marriage, and that’s very much filmmaking.”When all those different elements manage to coalesce on a premium race car — or a big-budget indie film — it’s beautiful, Driver said. “It also makes you aware of how many things could go wrong at any moment,” he noted. “It’s a special thing to be part of.” 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

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      William Friedkin’s Final Film to Premiere at the Venice Film Festival

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      “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial,” with Jake Lacy and Kiefer Sutherland, was the director’s first new drama in more than a decade.The director William Friedkin died on Monday at age 87, leaving behind a filmography that included hits like “The Exorcist” and “The French Connection.”But Friedkin had also completed one last project, “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial.” Made for Paramount and Showtime, it is set to premiere in a few weeks at the Venice Film Festival, where in 2013 he won a lifetime achievement prize.Adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Herman Wouk, “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial” follows the trial of a naval officer (played by Jake Lacy) who is accused of leading a mutiny against his unstable commander (Kiefer Sutherland). The story was first adapted for the 1954 film “The Caine Mutiny,” which was nominated for seven Oscars including best picture. Though that film and Wouk’s novel take place during World War II, Friedkin contemporized the story and relocated the action to the Persian Gulf.“The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial” is Friedkin’s 20th narrative film and his first since 2011’s “Killer Joe,” which starred Matthew McConaughey. In the interim, Friedkin directed a documentary, “The Devil and Father Amorth,” about a purported real-life exorcism.“I’ve looked at a lot of scripts in the last 10 years, and I haven’t seen anything I really wanted to do,” Friedkin said in an interview last year while announcing the project. “But I think about it a lot, and it occurred to me that could be a very timely and important piece, as well as being great drama. ‘The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial’ is one of the best court-martial dramas ever written.”The Venice Film Festival runs Aug. 30 to Sept. 9, though organizers have not yet announced a premiere date for Friedkin’s film. Unlike high-profile Venice films like Bradley Cooper’s “Maestro” and Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla,” this posthumous effort will play out of competition, as per Friedkin’s wishes: In an expletive-laden scene from the documentary “Friedkin Uncut,” the director ranted against the idea of festival competitions manned by “a bunch of schmucks who call themselves judges.” More

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      Pema Tseden, Pioneering Tibetan Filmmaker, Is Dead at 53

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      His films captured contemporary Tibetan life as Tibetans saw it, devoid of the stereotypes long associated with their homeland.Pema Tseden, a filmmaker and author who presented an honest look at contemporary Tibetan life despite intense scrutiny from Chinese censors, died on Monday in Tibet. He was 53.His death was announced in a statement by the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, where he was a professor. The statement did not specify a cause or say where he died.Tibet and its people have often been misrepresented with clichés. For the West, it was utopia, a fantasy based on the depiction of Shangri-La in the British author James Hilton’s 1933 novel, “Lost Horizon.” For the Communist Party of China, Tibetans were serfs or barbarians in need of rescue and rehabilitation, with propaganda films portraying Han cadres as liberators. Pema Tseden (pronounced WA-ma TSAY-ten in his native dialect), who like most Tibetans had no family name and went instead by his two given names, said that as a child, he had longed for accurate representations of his home, people and culture that existing Hollywood and Chinese films didn’t provide.“Whether it was the clothes, the customs, the manners, every element, even the smallest, was inaccurate,” he said in a 2019 interview. “Because of that, at the time, I thought that later on, if someone made films with even a little knowledge of the language of my people, the culture, the traditions of my people, it would be completely different.”In his films, Pema Tseden rarely depicted Tibet’s Chinese population, which swelled after the Red Army seized Tibet in 1951. To elude Chinese censors, he eschewed references to the Dalai Lama, who has been seen in China as supporting Tibetan independence. This allowed him to avoid overtly political critiques while still tackling broader themes, like the loss of traditions and identity in the face of modernization.Genden Phuntsok, left, and J. Jinpa in a scene from “Jinpa,” Pema Tseden’s film about a truck driver who runs over a sheep and then picks up a hitchhiker.Icarus FilmsHe was the first Tibetan filmmaker working in China to shoot a feature film entirely in the Tibetan language. He was also the first Tibetan director to graduate from the prestigious Beijing Film Academy, which cultivated the country’s leading directors. But like all artists in China exploring ethnic minorities and religion, he was subject to additional vetting from state censors and required to submit scripts in Chinese for review.“His challenge, of course, was to make films that would reflect a Tibetan sense of identity, a Tibetan cultural sensibility, while not upsetting the Chinese authorities,” Tenzing Sonam, a Tibetan filmmaker and writer living in Dharamshala, India, said by phone. “Pema Tseden navigated that fine line incredibly well.”In “The Silent Holy Stones” (2005), he depicted everyday Tibetan experiences: monks becoming engrossed with television, villagers rehearsing for a New Year’s opera performance. And in “Old Dog” (2011), images of barbed-wire fences stretching across the Tibetan grasslands examined the power of the state and the complexities of privatizing ancestral lands.Pema Tseden’s “Old Dog” (2011) examined the complexities of privatizing ancestral lands.Icarus FilmsHis movies were “not just about Tibet,” Tsering Shakya, a Tibetan historian and scholar at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, said in an interview. “This is about China and people who are left behind by China’s economic miracle.”As Pema Tseden’s clout grew, China’s film industry and its audiences began to accept Tibetan as a language used on the big screen. And by combining Tibetan traditions of oral storytelling and song with modern filmmaking formats, his movies gave rise to an entirely new genre that some called the Tibetan New Wave.“The stories his films contained — which are always meticulously framed and exquisitely modulated — speak powerful truths in the gentlest of voices,” said Shelly Kraicer, a Chinese cinema curator and researcher who wrote subtitles for some of Pema Tseden’s work. “He’s a key world filmmaker.”He sought to build a tight-knit network of Tibetan filmmakers, including Sonthar Gyal, Dukar Tserang, Lhapal Gyal and Pema Tseden’s, son, Jigme Trinley, who went on to direct their own films. Drivers, assistants and other members of the crew sometimes juggled more than one role, appearing as extras and coaching actors in regional dialects.“He created from scratch an embryonic Tibetan film circle, film industry,” Françoise Robin, a professor of Tibetan language and literature at the National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations in Paris who knew Pema Tseden for over two decades, said by phone. “He’s very faithful in friendship. Some people worked with him for 10 years.”“Tharlo” (2015), the story of a shepherd who travels outside his isolated village to register for a government ID, premiered at the Venice Film Festival.Tsemdo/Icarus FilmsPema Tseden was born on Dec. 3, 1969, in Qinghai Province, part of a northeastern region of Tibet traditionally known as Amdo. His parents were farmers and herders.He was raised by his grandfather, who asked him to copy out Buddhist scriptures by hand after school, a practice that instilled in him an early appreciation for Tibetan language and culture. He worked as a teacher for four years before studying Tibetan literature and translation at the Northwest University for Nationalities in Lanzhou. He then worked for several years as a civil servant in his home province.Starting in 1991, he published short stories set in Tibet, written in both Tibetan and Chinese, about individuals confronted with sweeping changes. They underscored the importance of forging a connection with nature and animals, showing “the complexity of life in the simplest language,” said Jessica Yeung, a professor at Hong Kong Baptist University who knew Pema Tseden for a decade and translated his work. He later adapted some of his stories into films.After attending the Beijing Film Academy in the early 2000s, he released “The Silent Holy Stones” to critical acclaim, as well as several other films. A decade later, “Tharlo” (2015), about the journey of a shepherd who must travel outside his isolated village to register for a government ID, premiered at the Venice Film Festival. It won numerous awards, including a Golden Horse Award for best adapted screenplay in Taiwan. Among Tibetans, it also became a seminal work for aspiring filmmakers within a few years.“A Tibetan film should show Tibetan life,” Pema Tseden said in an undated interview that was recently released by Kangba TV, a Tibetan-language broadcaster. “In my case, from my first film onward, I wanted my movies to absolutely include characters who are Tibetan, who would all speak Tibetan, and whose behavior and way of thinking were Tibetan. This is what makes Tibetan films different.”Pema Tseden’s subsequent films benefited from his higher profile. “Jinpa” (2018), about a truck driver who runs over a sheep and then picks up a hitchhiker, was produced by the Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-wai’s Jet Tone Films and premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the Orizzonti Award for best screenplay. “Balloon” (2019), about a family coping with an unexpected pregnancy amid China’s family planning laws, also premiered in Venice. A forthcoming film, “Snow Leopard,” about the tense relationship between humans and predatory animals, is currently in postproduction. At his death, he was working on another film.Information on survivors in addition to his son was not immediately available.Li You More