Among the many other features world premiering at the 83rd Venice Film Festival are these worthy titles.
Also, a mention to Alba Rohrwacher & Guido Caprino who deliver heartbreaking, authentic performances in Anna Foglietta’s penetrating Una Storia (A Common Story).
Trick (Scherzetto)
Set almost entirely in a Naples apartment and balcony, Mario Martone’s Trick (Scherzetto) focuses on an acclaimed illustrator Daniele Mallarico (Toni Servillo, in his seventh collaboration with the director), who has been living and working alone for many years. He arrives at the home of his daughter (a terrific Serena Rossi), which is also the home he grew up in, to look after his extremely smart and often disruptive 5-year-old grandson, Mario (Lorenzo Perrotta).
The introspective Daniele is haunted by ghosts from his past. The rascal Mario simply wants to skip school, play games and spend time with his grandfather. What unfolds is a wonderful two-hander of sorts with absolutely splendid work by the always gifted Servillo and the rather remarkable young Perotta.
Scherzetto is just a delight.
The film is world premiering Out of Competition at the Venice Film Festival.
In Italian, with English subtitles
Ground Floor (Földszint)
“What in God’s name is going on in this building?”
–asks a frenzied Kristóf in Ground Floor (Földszint)
On the eve of a summer vacation, one-time painter Kristóf (Ádám Tompa in a hilariously unhinged performance) is on the phone with his wife Vera (Bettina Józsa), when his cell phone falls behind their closet. In order to retrieve it he must break into the wall. And he discovers black mold.
Kristóf sets about to finding out how bad the situation is and notices a lot of sealed cracks in various apartments and a potential. water leak. He visits the building manager (Rodrigo Crespo, perfectly deranged), who appears fixated on getting a new elevator in the building and gives Kristóf a lot of doubletalk, as does his lumbering flunky. They’re clearly hiding something.
The now-determined tenant is more driven than ever to get to the bottom of things and must deal with his estranged best friend, who may or may not have had an affair with his wife, a super drunk mold expert, a bunch of nutty apartment dwellers and a not so happy Rottweiler.
Hungarian helmer and former Venice Horizon’s Award winner Gábor Reisz has created a wonderfully absurd social and political parable with Ground Floor (Földszint). The deadpan satire builds to a zany stakes-raising climax, only to lead to a disappointing non-ending.
Still, it’s definitely worth watching for its dry, witty humor and wackadoodle performances.
The film is world premiering in the Spotlight Section at the Venice Film Festival.
In Hungarian and Italian, with English subtitles.
Until the Day Ends (Do Kraja Dana)
Jelena Maksimović’s feature debut Until the Day Ends (Do Kraja Dana), is a work of fiction set against the backdrop of the largest Serbian student protests in decades and one of the largest in Europe.
The film centers on Lena (Lena Trifunović), an anarchist student involved in Belgrade’s anti-government movement. She first meets shy, working-class Stefan (Andrija Krivokapić), when he is helping her brother sell her precious piano, one of the few things she has left that reminds her of her father. Lena immediately takes a like/dislike towards Stefan.
When the protests begin, Stefan is apprehensively part of the pro-government loyalists. Lena is definitely on the other side. We see Lena pick up a stone, put it down, someone else picks it up, puts it down, then someone else (maybe Stefan) picks it up and throws it, injuring a police officer. The two find each other and, after a tense altercation with some officers, flee to a trailer in the remote woods, where they fall for one another.
Maksimović’s has a distinct, contemplative style all her own. The camera moves shakily; framing is deliberately off. We see image sideways, upside down, sometimes we’re not certain what we’re looking at. It’s frustrating but also fascinating. And the story is told with very little dialogue. The cast is made up of non-professional actors, with the exception of Miodrag Dragicevic who plays Lena’s brother.
Trifunović and Krivokapić are quite compelling.
I was also quite struck with the film’s final moments.
The film is part of the Horizons (Orizzonti) section of the Venice Film Festival.
In Serbian, with English subtitles.
Big Little Things (Huangyan Shenghuo)
Produced as a Hong Kong-US collaboration, Michelle Zhou’s moody, resonant feature, Big Little Things (Huangyan Shenghuo) follows Lei (Cuishan Liang), a young woman who in a lesbian relationship with Bei (Jialing Sun) but refuses to tell her middle-class Chinese parents about it, afraid they would refuse to accept it. She concocts a plan to bring a handsome young student, Yao (Bin Yu) home to pretend to be her boyfriend and win them over. But things don’t necessarily go to plan.
We’ve seen this premise before, usually in comedies, but Zhou takes the situations very seriously, showing that in many cultures today around the world, coming out to one’s parents is still a heady and scary thing and, too often, has negative results, especially where familial expectations are rigid.
Lei’s mother’s selfish and wholly unsympathetic reaction to her finally telling her is, “how can you do this to me,” as if she is deliberately trying to hurt her.
Zhou creates a contemplative and evocative cinematic world, but the film would have benefited from less snowy landscape shots and more character analysis and interaction.
Big Little Things is part of the Horizons (Orizzonti) section of the Venice Film Festival.
In Mandarin Chinese, with English subtitles.
