The Peaks and Pits of the Venice Film Festival

The heat was unforgiving at this year’s Venice Film Festival. With temperatures surpassing 30 degrees, journeys for delegates across the lagoon in crowded vaporettos were near-unbearable, and screenings often carried a collective whiff of sweat. Throughout the festival, the cinema became an air-conditioned safe haven, a blissful escape from being fried outdoors – even when the films themselves invited audiences to stare death, fascism and obsession in the face.

Across the 10-day festival, and through some of the most electrifying cinema of the year so far, I noticed fascinations with impending doom, odes to art as preservation of life and journeys through the destabilising impact of erotic lust. One of the most anticipated premieres was Luca Guadagnino’s Queer,  based on William S. Burroughs’ novel of the same name, starring Daniel Craig as an expat in 1950s Mexico City whose free-wheeling lifestyle is shattered by his obsession with Eugene (Drew Starkey), a beautiful young Navyman. With Guadagnino broadly softening the darker elements of Burroughs’ novel, the adaptation becomes a forgiving portrait of the tragic emptiness plaguing one listless, wealthy expat. Craig’s performance is a brilliant study of how desire dangerously magnifies self-loathing, physically embodying romantic humiliation – nervous waving across the bar, or overblown gestures of affection – to a comical and heartbreaking degree. Starkey is equally captivating, carefully communicating the occasional glimpse of the fears and desires usually hidden beneath Eugene’s immaculate tailoring, courtesy of costume designer Jonathan Anderson.

In the latter half, the lovers journey to South America to search for a famed drug Lee hopes will give him telepathic powers (a sad attempt to learn the inner workings of Eugene’s impetuousness). Upon arrival, a voyage into the jungle reveals the drug to be ayahuasca, and Guadagnino turns Lee and Eugene’s mutual trip into one of the most breathtaking and melancholic scenes in the film, their bodies literally fusing together during a hypnotic dance sequence that rivals Natalie Portman’s alien encounter in 2018’s Annihilation. 

Secret, erotic urges are also the driving force of Babygirl. In Dutch actress-turned-director Halina Reijn’s follow-up to Bodies Bodies Bodies, Nicole Kidman (winner of the Volpi Cup for Best Actress) plays Romy, a tech CEO who begins an affair with a new intern named Samuel (Dickinson), bringing kinks and desires she had kept buried for years to the surface. With ruthless precision, Reijn analyses the nuances of how Romy and Samuel’s power dynamic is complicated by age and gender, their affair playing out with a bracing blend of anxiety and pleasure performed seamlessly by Kidman and Dickinson.

Both Guadagnino and Reijn handle explicit sex and nudity in their films gracefully. Babygirl’s  intimate scenes strike an impressive balance between funny and sexy as Reijn emphasises female pleasure and hidden kinks, while Queer  depicts sex as the one place Eugene and Lee share genuine tenderness. I had hoped these thoughtful depictions of sex would invite equally thoughtful questions from journalists during press conferences, and they mostly  did, aside from Guadagnino having to rescue Daniel Craig from a useless question about whether there would ever be a gay James Bond. Has everyone forgotten Skyfall? 

Meanwhile, The Brutalist, The Room Next Door and Maria consider art as a tool to both preserve life and process death. In The Brutalist, for which director Brady Corbett (Vox Lux) won the festival’s best director prize, Adrien Brody plays a Hungarian holocaust survivor and architect who arrives in America and takes on a life-changing project for a wealthy client (Guy Pearce). The project serves as a hope to preserve his legacy and shape the future of architecture itself. Distilling Corbett’s three-and-a-half hour opus down to a sentiment is futile, but through astounding performances and a rousing score, he tells a story of ambition, sacrifice and the looming shadow of 20th-century fascism with the kind of depth found in 800-page novels.

The Room Next Door and Maria, meanwhile, pose the rather terrifying question: what happens when art is not enough? The former, the great Pedro Almodóvar’s English-language debut and winner of the Golden Lion, stars Tilda Swinton as Martha, a war photographer who wishes to halt her cancer treatment and die on her own terms. Describing a harrowing feeling to Ingrid (Julianne Moore), an old friend asked to join her for her final days, Martha explains the pain of her illness means music, movies, books and art have ceased to move her. 

In several scenes, Almodóvar captures Martha and Ingrid conversing outside on sun loungers, a direct homage to Edward Hopper’s painting ‘People in the Sun,’ which hangs in the house Martha has rented for her final days. In doing so, Almodóvar invites us inside the predicament: the image is a beautiful preservation of the two women and their relationship in time. But if art is meaningless to the subjects themselves, is the image hollow? If it’s a memorialisation, is it honest? With the film also contemplating the looming threat of global warming, Almodóvar is clearly fascinated by both the powers and limitations of art as salvation. The result is a film that is both philosophical and gorgeous to look at, even if some critics were put off by its stilted, often obvious dialogue.

Maria, meanwhile, depicts an artist betrayed by their own art, with Angelina Jolie playing Maria Callas in the final week of the opera singer’s life. The third film in Pablo Larraín’s study of iconic women in history after Jackie and Spencer, Maria chronicles the pain Callas felt as she lost control of her singing voice while neglecting to treat the illness that eventually took her life. Jolie is magnificent, but I was particularly moved by the attention Larraín pays to what Callas did have in her final moments. The sumptuous production design fills her Paris apartment with softness and comfort, and the sensitive performances from Italian actors Alba Rohrwacher and Pierfrancesco Favino as her maid and butler – and shared caregivers – make Maria as much a portrait of an artist as an ode to the solace of home. (It’s unfortunate that Rohrwacher and Favino’s characters lack definition beyond their employment by Callas, but Larraín is unwaveringly committed to a psychological study of Callas alone.)

After a full week, I was yet to see a bad film at Venice, but as the festival drew to a close, the heatwave broke at the same time as my hot streak. As I walked out of Joker: Folie à Deux on my last day at the festival, a dark cloud was approaching the Lido from the Adriatic, an appropriate meteorological response to Todd Phillips’ “not a musical” (definitely a musical) sequel starring Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga. Dreary, incoherent and full of blandly-filmed musical numbers, Folie à Deux felt like the breaking of a spell, just like the curtain of rain opening over Venice. As the downpour brought the tide ominously high, thunder and lightning rattling the bricks of the bridges, I walked home in a funk, struggling to process the audacity of a film that dared to under-use Lady Gaga.

Despite ending on a dud, I left this year’s Venice feeling beguiled and transported. From emerging to established auteurs, the lineup was unafraid to confront some of society’s most enduring taboos while questioning the very function and purpose of art-making. The answer differed from film to film – art comforts, art informs, art defines a life. But above all, the crushing heat outdoors amplified what the darkness of the picture house provides: an escape.