The Venice experience has been wonderful, fabulous, challenging, bonkers-exhausting—and I’d do it again in a heartbeat!
I’d want to express my gratitude to Clarence, Joey, and Megan for the opportunity to begin my The Contending journey with them by publishing my musings, sometimes literally written and/or dictated into my iPhone while waiting in a press line for the next screening. That’s a new experience for me. On to…New York!
Love
Norwegian filmmaker Dag Johan Haugerud’s Love was the last in-competition film to screen in Venice and, strangely, may be my favorite of ALL the films I’ve seen.
It’s so rare to see good people wanting to be better people portrayed on screen and even more infrequent to see a film that delves so honestly and uniquely into themes that deal with intimacy, sex, love, friendship, the human body’s limitations and everyone’s capacity to change and grow.
The film is an exquisite, transfixing work of art.
This is the second work in a trilogy. The first, Sex, was part of the Berlin International Film Festival earlier this year and was about a married straight man who has sex with another man. Dreams, the final film, will open in 2025.
More people need to be exposed to this director’s exquisite work.
Set in Oslo in the month of August, the film follows two separate healthcare workers, Marianne (Andrea Bræin Hovig) a urologist, and Tor (Tayo Cittadella Jacobsen), a gay male nurse she works with. They spend their work days talking prostate cancer patients through treatment options. Both are searching for their own kind of intimacy.
Marianne is open to a relationship and has just been introduced to a nice, recently divorced geologist (Thomas Gullestad). Tor is a proud sexual being, who isn’t looking for any attachments.
One day, riding the ferry, Tor shares his feelings about casual sex with a very intrigued Marianne, who some days later finds herself hooking up with a stranger, and enjoying it.
Tor meets an older psychologist Bjorn (Lars Jacob Holm, heartbreaking) and is so smitten he begins to pursue him.
I won’t give too much else away except to say the film’s screenplay is so keen and insightful it had me musing on its themes long after the closing credits.
Hovig and Jacobsen both deliver nuanced and radiant work.
Cecilie Semec’s gorgeous cinematography and Peder Kjellsby’s magnificent jazz score must also be cited.
I also want to applaud the queer-positivity inherent in “Love” as well as the sex-positive exploration.
We’ve seen many romance films where couples get to know one another and it blossoms into love, or it doesn’t. We’ve certainly had casual sex films. But the twain has never quite met the way it does in Haugerud’s intelligent, tender and penetrating work.
Maldoror
Fabric Du Weiz’s Maldoror is a riveting and disturbing crime thriller, inspired by real events that happened in Belgium in the mid-90s, about political corruption and police negligence involving the investigation into the disappearance of two young girls.
In a scroll at the film’s outset, we’re told that because they fear a reform that would merge all three departments, the Gendarmerie, local police and judicial police refuse to cooperate with one another which leads to the events about to be depicted.
The movie centers on a hot-headed young police officer, Paul Chartier (an excellent Anthony Bajon), who is assigned to a secret unit known as “Maldoror,” that will monitor a dangerous sex offender who may be involved in rape, murder and a possible pedophile ring. But the investigation is stymied by bureaucratic red tape (and someone pulling strings from on high?), which leads to tragedy and galvanizes Chartier into taking matters into his own hands.
Du Weiz packs a lot into this 155-minute nail-biter, yet I wish he’d given us a bit more since the film is quite confusing at times, especially in the second half. Bajon, who won the Berlin International Film Festival’s Silver Bear for Best Actor for the 2018 film The Prayer, keeps us transifxed.
In French and Sicilian with English subtitles.
Familiar Touch
I’ve noticed that certain indie films made in the last few years, seem to delight in trying an audience’s collective patience with lugubrious, drawn-out scenes where nothing quite happens. And way too many critics eat it up as innovative. When all they really do is annoy and alienate.
I am happy to report that, although Sarah Friedland’s Familiar Touch is a film chock full of detailed minutiae and segments where little is happening, so much is actually happening. Each shot is designed to illuminate, as much as possible, the struggling inner world of Ruth Goldman (Kathleen Chalfant, original Broadway cast of Angels in America), an aging woman with dementia who must now relocate to an assisted living facility and deal with new faces and surroundings.
We share in Ruth’s frustrations and are empathetic to her unfortunate situation. Ruth is a former cook, and she does remember how to cook! One of the things the film gets so right is that, despite the increasing loss of memory in some who struggle with dementia, just how certain past memories remain crystal clear— as if they happened yesterday.
Inspired by Friedland’s work as a memory care worker and older adult teaching artist, the film owes a lot to Chalfant who delivers an understated, nuanced turn.
Full disclosure, both my parents suffered from memory loss in their later years. Dad had Alzheimer’s which is murder on the loved ones, but he was in his own happy world. Mamma had dementia, not a treat as she struggled, as Ruth does in the film, with the realization that she was losing her memory. However, she had good past memory recall and was able to create an entire new world in her head to keep herself going. All that said, I tend to get frustrated with certain lauded films that feel the need to elicit our sympathy (Amour). Familiar Touch is never maudlin and tells Ruth’s story with grace and dignity.
Happy Holidays
Oscar-nominated Palestinian filmmaker Scandar Copti (Ajami, 2009) has crafted a non-linear slow-burn meditation on cultural and generational misogyny born of religious, political and societal dictates.
Happy Holidays follows a group of people living in Haifa, Israel that are grappling with life-changing experiences. Rami (Toufic Danial) is a Palestinian who has just been told his Jewish girlfriend is pregnant and refuses to get an abortion, which is quite problematic for him and his family. His mother Hanan (Wafaa Aoun) is coming to terms with her husband’s financial wrongdoings as she insists on paying for her older daughter’s wedding. Hanan’s younger daughter, Fifi (a terrific Manar Shehab), is hiding a secret that risks tearing the family, and her new relationship with Dr. Walid (Read Memorsky), to shreds.
Happy Holidays is broken into chapters so we are provided with cinematic puzzle pieces. The end result may appear too subtle to “sophisticated” audiences but given the location and culture, it’s quite bold.
In Hebrew and Arabic with English subtitles.
Il Tempo Che Ci Vuole (The Time it Takes)
Very late in Francesco Comencini’s lyrical new film, Il Tempo Che Ci Vuole (The Time it Takes), an aging filmmaker bursts into tears watching Rossellini‘s Paisà. He then has a monologue, spoken to his daughter, about how his recall isn’t very good anymore but hhe clearly remembers all the silent films that he saved as a boy, before they sent them to the scrap heap. It’s a lovely moment about what cinema means to him and what it should be all about.
Lovely is the perfect way to describe Comencini’s film, a meditation on the love one fiercely protective father (a glorious Fabrizio Gifuni) has for his devoted but troubled daughter (Romana Maggiore Vergano).
Through political and social upheavals the film traces the relationship from the daughter’s childhood to the father’s final years. The film is about memory and cinema and how they blend together. “With cinema, with imagination, you can escape,” the father insists. Il Tempo Che Ci Vuole provides a poignant escape, but also a way for the audience to look back on their own lives, via the movies that shaped who they are.
In Italian and French with English subtitles.
Diciannove
Other than the many vista-captures, newcomer Manfredi Marini is in every scene of Giovanni Tortorici’s seductive, if sometimes too fragmented debut feature, Diciannove (Italian for Nineteen). And he proves to be a captivating presence onscreen.
The slight script follows Leonardo (Marini), our 19-year-old protag, as he leaves his controlling mother in Palermo to venture to business school in London where he parties hard with his sister and her annoying friend, kissing random girls and vomiting a lot. He soon realizes what he really wants to study is Italian literature and is immediately off to the gorgeous Tuscan city of Siena, which alleges (according to Google) to have the best program in Europe. Alas, Leo is in no way galvanized by his dull professor’s lectures, and he practically ignores his new roommates. So Leo is off to Milan partying with friends, kissing girls and vomiting a lot, again.
From the nosebleed opening (which is never revisited) to a few homoerotic moments that go nowhere, to a fascinating late-reel chat with an older friend of his uncle’s, Leo remains a rather smart (if a bit arrogant) enigmatic, yet endearing guy simply trying to figure out his place in the world. Like many a teen, he often has the attention span of a gnat and doesn’t quite feel comfortable in his own skin. Also, he appears to be aware of his good looks, but not too aware. It’s that odd age where you’re feeling yourself out.
Produced by Luca Guadagnino, (Tortorici worked for him as an assistant director) the film has a fantastic throwback score by Vito Martinelli and Michele Gualdrini and is nicely shot by Massimiliano Kuveiller, Diciannove is worth a look to watch Marini, a star in the making.
In Italian with English subtitles.
Edge of Night
“If you obey blindly you lose your humanity.”
The above line is spoken from one brother to another in Türker Süer’s searing look at blind loyalty to one’s country vs. one’s family, Edge of Night.
Sinan (Ahmet Rifat Sungar) is an ambitious lieutenant Turkish army who was responsible for his own father’s death via his betrayal for allegedly being part of the opposition. He is asked by his higher ups to escort his own brother Kenan (Berk Hakman) to military court. He agrees and, while they are en route, a coup breaks out in the country and no one is sure whose side anyone is on. After he comes to certain realizations, Sinan must make a life-changing decision.
Edge of Night is most absorbing in the late scenes between the two brothers as they try and figure out who they are and what they want to be.
In Turkish with English subtitles.
